the aeneid
Virgil
technical director Maxwell Krohn
editorial director Justin Kestler
managing editor Ben Florman
series editors Boomie Aglietti, Justin Kestler
production Christian Lorentzen
writers Patrick Gardner, Matilda Santos
editors Sarah Friedberg, Christian Lorentzen
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iii
Contents
context
1
plot overview
5
character list
mortals
gods and goddesses
characters from homer’s ILIAD
relevant to the AENEID
7
7
9
11
analysis of major characters
aeneas
dido
turnus
13
13
14
15
themes, motifs & symbols
the primacy of fate
the sufferings of wanderers
the glory of rome
prophecies and predictions
founding a new city
vengeance
flames
the golden bough
the gates of war
the trojan hearth gods
weather
17
17
17
18
19
19
19
20
20
20
21
21
summary
book
book
book
book
book
book
book
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23
26
29
32
35
39
42
& analysis
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ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
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book
book
book
book
book
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
44
47
50
53
55
important quotations explained
59
key facts
65
study questions & essay topics
69
review & resources
quiz
suggestions for further reading
73
73
78
note: This SparkNote is based on the Vintage
Classics edition of the Aeneid, translated by
Robert Fitzgerald. All other English translations
vary in language and line numbering.
v
Context
1
con t e xt
V
irgil, the preeminent poet of the Roman Empire,
was born Publius Vergilius Maro on October 15,
70 b.c., near Mantua, a city in northern Italy. The son
of a farmer, Virgil studied in Cremona, then in Milan,
and finally in Rome. Around 41 b.c., he returned to
Mantua to begin work on his Eclogues, which he published in 37 b.c.
Soon afterward, civil war forced him to flee south to Naples, where
seven years later he finished his second work, the Georgics, a long
poem on farming. Virgil’s writing gained him the recognition of the
public, wealth from patrons, and the favor of the emperor.
Virgil lived at the height of the first age of the Roman Empire,
during the reign of the emperor Octavian, later known as Augustus.
Before Augustus became emperor, though, internal strife plagued
the Roman government. During Virgil’s youth, the First Triumvirate—Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus—governed the Roman
Republic. Crassus was killed around 53 b.c., and Caesar initiated
civil war against Pompey. After defeating Pompey, Caesar reigned
alone until the Ides of March in 44 b.c., when Brutus and Cassius,
two senators, assassinated him. Civil war erupted between the
assassins and the Second Triumvirate—Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus. By 36 b.c. only Octavian and Antony remained, and they
began warring against each other. At the Battle of Actium in
31 b.c., Octavian defeated Antony and his ally Cleopatra of Egypt,
finally consolidating power in himself alone. Four years later, he
assumed the title Augustus. Virgil witnessed all this turmoil, and the
warring often disrupted his life.
Immediately after finishing the Georgics, Virgil began his masterwork, the Aeneid. He was fortunate enough to enter the good
graces of Augustus, and, in part, the Aeneid serves to legitimize
Augustus’s reign. The Aeneid tells the story of the Trojan hero
Aeneas’s perilous flight from Troy to Italy following the Trojan
War. In Italy, Aeneas’s descendents would go on to found Rome. In
the epic, Virgil repeatedly foreshadows the coming of Augustus,
perhaps to silence critics who claimed that he achieved power
through violence and treachery. (Whether or not Virgil truly
believed all the praise he heaped upon Augustus is a matter of
debate.) When Rome was at its height, the easiest way to justify the
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recent brutal events was to claim that the civil wars and the changes
in leadership had been decreed by fate to usher in the reign of the
great Augustus. Yet the Aeneid is by no means a purely political
work; like other epic poems, its subject stands on its own as a story
for all time.
Virgil did not invent the story that Rome descended from Troy;
he crafted the events narrated in the Aeneid from an existing tradition surrounding Aeneas that extended from the ancient Greek poet
Homer through the contemporary Roman historian Livy. In Book
XX of the Iliad, Aeneas faces off with Achilles, and we learn about
Aeneas’s lineage and his reputation for bravery. However, in that
scene, he is no match for Achilles, who has been outfitted in armor
forged by the divine smith Hephaestus. Poseidon rescues Aeneas
from certain doom and praises the Trojan for his piety. Poseidon
also prophesies that Aeneas will survive the Trojan War and assume
leadership over the Trojan people.
Ancient accounts of Aeneas’s postwar wanderings vary. Greek art
from the sixth century b.c. portrays Aeneas carrying his father,
Anchises, out from the burning ruins of Troy. Archaeological evidence suggests that the myth of Aeneas was often depicted in art on
the Italian mainland as early as the sixth century b.c. The settlement
of Aeneas and the Trojans in Italy and their connection with the
foundation of Rome entered the written tradition centuries after
Homer, at the end of the third century b.c. Earlier poets, including
the Roman Varro, had connected Dido and Aeneas, but Virgil was
the first to tie all the elements of Aeneas’s story together in epic form.
After eleven years of composition, the meticulous Virgil did not
consider the Aeneid fit for publication. He planned to spend three
years editing it, but fell ill returning from a trip to Greece. Just
before his death on September 21, 19 b.c., he ordered the manuscript of the Aeneid to be burned, because he still considered it
unfinished. Augustus intervened, however, arranging for the poem
to be published against Virgil’s wishes.
Virgil’s masterful and meticulously crafted poetry earned him a
legacy as the greatest poet in the Latin language. Throughout the
Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, his fame only grew. Before
the invention of the printing press, when classical texts, transmitted
by the hands of scribes, were scarce, Virgil’s poetry was available to
the literate classes, among whom he was regarded as the most significant writer of antiquity. He inspired poets across languages,
including Dante in Italian, Milton in English, and an anonymous
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con t e xt
French poet who reworked the Aeneid into the medieval romance
Le Roman d’Eneas. In what became a Christian culture, Virgil was
viewed as a pagan prophet because several lines in his works were
interpreted as predictions of the coming of Christ. Among writers of
the Renaissance, Virgil was appreciated for the fluidity of his rigorously structured poetry and his vivid portrayals of human emotion.
Modern critics, on the other hand, have been less kind. Virgil’s
poetry is often judged in relation to that of his Greek predecessors,
especially the Iliad and the Odyssey, epics attributed to Homer
that also portray the Trojan War and its aftermath. Most contemporary scholars hold that Virgil’s poetry pales in comparison to
Homer’s. Virgil himself often viewed his poetry in light of
Homer’s; he invoked such comparisons within the Aeneid and
wished to surpass the Greek poet, while still borrowing from him
heavily. Virgil’s poetry does not possess the same originality of
expression as Homeric epic poetry. The Aeneid shares with the
Iliad and the Odyssey a tone of ironic tragedy, as characters act
against their own wishes, submit their lives to fate, and often meet
dark ends. Most scholars agree that Virgil distinguished himself
within the epic tradition of antiquity by representing the broad
spectrum of human emotion in his characters as they are subsumed
in the historical tides of dislocation and war.
Plot Overview
5
p l ot ove rvi ew
O
n the mediterranean sea, Aeneas and his fellow
Trojans flee from their home city of Troy, which has
been destroyed by the Greeks. They sail for Italy,
where Aeneas is destined to found Rome. As they
near their destination, a fierce storm throws them off
course and lands them in Carthage. Dido, Carthage’s founder and
queen, welcomes them. Aeneas relates to Dido the long and painful
story of his group’s travels thus far.
Aeneas tells of the sack of Troy that ended the Trojan War after ten
years of Greek siege. In the final campaign, the Trojans were tricked
when they accepted into their city walls a wooden horse that, unbeknownst to them, harbored several Greek soldiers in its hollow belly.
He tells how he escaped the burning city with his father, Anchises, his
son, Ascanius, and the hearth gods that represent their fallen city.
Assured by the gods that a glorious future awaited him in Italy, he set
sail with a fleet containing the surviving citizens of Troy. Aeneas
relates the ordeals they faced on their journey. Twice they attempted
to build a new city, only to be driven away by bad omens and plagues.
Harpies, creatures that are part woman and part bird, cursed them,
but they also encountered friendly countrymen unexpectedly.
Finally, after the loss of Anchises and a bout of terrible weather, they
made their way to Carthage.
Impressed by Aeneas’s exploits and sympathetic to his suffering,
Dido, a Phoenician princess who fled her home and founded
Carthage after her brother murdered her husband, falls in love with
Aeneas. They live together as lovers for a period, until the gods
remind Aeneas of his duty to found a new city. He determines to set
sail once again. Dido is devastated by his departure, and kills herself
by ordering a huge pyre to be built with Aeneas’s castaway possessions, climbing upon it, and stabbing herself with the sword Aeneas
leaves behind.
As the Trojans make for Italy, bad weather blows them to Sicily,
where they hold funeral games for the dead Anchises. The women,
tired of the voyage, begin to burn the ships, but a downpour puts
the fires out. Some of the travel-weary stay behind, while Aeneas,
reinvigorated after his father visits him in a dream, takes the rest
on toward Italy. Once there, Aeneas descends into the underworld,
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guided by the Sibyl of Cumae, to visit his father. He is shown a
pageant of the future history and heroes of Rome, which helps him
to understand the importance of his mission. Aeneas returns from
the underworld, and the Trojans continue up the coast to the
region of Latium.
The arrival of the Trojans in Italy begins peacefully. King Latinus, the Italian ruler, extends his hospitality, hoping that Aeneas
will prove to be the foreigner whom, according to a prophecy, his
daughter Lavinia is supposed to marry. But Latinus’s wife, Amata,
has other ideas. She means for Lavinia to marry Turnus, a local
suitor. Amata and Turnus cultivate enmity toward the newly
arrived Trojans. Meanwhile, Ascanius hunts a stag that was a pet of
the local herdsmen. A fight breaks out, and several people are killed.
Turnus, riding this current of anger, begins a war.
Aeneas, at the suggestion of the river god Tiberinus, sails north
up the Tiber to seek military support among the neighboring
tribes. During this voyage, his mother, Venus, descends to give him
a new set of weapons, wrought by Vulcan. While the Trojan leader
is away, Turnus attacks. Aeneas returns to find his countrymen
embroiled in battle. Pallas, the son of Aeneas’s new ally Evander, is
killed by Turnus. Aeneas flies into a violent fury, and many more
are slain by the day’s end.
The two sides agree to a truce so that they can bury the dead, and
the Latin leaders discuss whether to continue the battle. They decide
to spare any further unnecessary carnage by proposing a hand-tohand duel between Aeneas and Turnus. When the two leaders face
off, however, the other men begin to quarrel, and full-scale battle
resumes. Aeneas is wounded in the thigh, but eventually the Trojans
threaten the enemy city. Turnus rushes out to meet Aeneas, who
wounds Turnus badly. Aeneas nearly spares Turnus but, remembering the slain Pallas, slays him instead.
Character List
MORTALS
The protagonist of the Aeneid. Aeneas is a survivor of
the siege of Troy, a city on the coast of Asia Minor. His
defining characteristic is piety, a respect for the will of
the gods. He is a fearsome warrior and a leader able to
motivate his men in the face of adversity, but also a man
capable of great compassion and sorrow. His destiny is
to found the Roman race in Italy and he subordinates
all other concerns to this mission. The Aeneid is about
his journey from Troy to Italy, which enables him to
fulfill his fate.
Dido
The queen of Carthage, a city in northern Africa, in
what is now Libya, and lover of Aeneas. Dido left the
land of Tyre when her husband was murdered by
Pygmalion, her brother. She and her city are strong, but
she becomes an unfortunate pawn of the gods in their
struggle for Aeneas’s destiny. Her love for Aeneas,
provoked by Venus, proves to be her downfall. After he
abandons her, she constructs a funeral pyre and stabs
herself upon it with Aeneas’s sword.
Turnus
The ruler of the Rutulians in Italy. Turnus is Aeneas’s
major antagonist among mortals. He is Lavinia’s
leading suitor until Aeneas arrives. This rivalry incites
him to wage war against the Trojans, despite Latinus’s
willingness to allow the Trojans to settle in Latium and
Turnus’s understanding that he cannot successfully
defy fate. He is brash and fearless, a capable soldier
who values his honor over his life.
Ascanius Aeneas’s young son by his first wife, Creusa. Ascanius
(also called Iulus) is most important as a symbol of
Aeneas’s destiny—his future founding of the Roman
race. Though still a child, Ascanius has several
7
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Aeneas
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character l is t
opportunities over the course of the epic to display his
bravery and leadership. He leads a procession of boys
on horseback during the games of Book V and he helps
to defend the Trojan camp from Turnus’s attack while
his father is away.
Anchises Aeneas’s father, and a symbol of Aeneas’s Trojan
heritage. Although Anchises dies during the journey
from Troy to Italy, he continues in spirit to help his son
fulfill fate’s decrees, especially by guiding Aeneas
through the underworld and showing him what fate
has in store for his descendants.
Creusa
Aeneas’s wife at Troy, and the mother of Ascanius.
Creusa is lost and killed as her family attempts to flee
the city, but tells Aeneas he will find a new wife at his
new home.
Sinon
The Greek youth who pretends to have been left behind
at the end of the Trojan War. Sinon persuades the
Trojans to take in the wooden horse as an offering to
Minerva, then lets out the warriors trapped inside the
horse’s belly.
Latinus
The king of the Latins, the people of what is now
central Italy, around the Tiber River. Latinus allows
Aeneas into his kingdom and encourages him to
become a suitor of Lavinia, his daughter, causing
resentment and eventually war among his subjects. He
respects the gods and fate, but does not hold strict
command over his people.
Lavinia
Latinus’s daughter and a symbol of Latium in general.
Lavinia’s character is not developed in the poem; she is
important only as the object of the Trojan-Latin
struggle. The question of who will marry Lavinia—
Turnus or Aeneas—becomes key to future relations
between the Latins and the Trojans and therefore the
Aeneid’s entire historical scheme.
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Queen of Laurentum (a region of Latium, in Italy) and
wife of Latinus. Amata opposes the marriage of
Lavinia, her daughter, to Aeneas and remains loyal
throughout to Turnus, Lavinia’s original suitor. Amata
kills herself once it is clear that Aeneas is destined
to win.
Evander
King of Pallanteum (a region of Arcadia, in Italy) and
father of Pallas. Evander is a sworn enemy of the
Latins, and Aeneas befriends him and secures his
assistance in the battles against Turnus.
Pallas
Son of Evander, whom Evander entrusts to Aeneas’s
care and tutelage. Pallas eventually dies in battle at the
hands of Turnus, causing Aeneas and Evander great
grief. To avenge Pallas’s death, Aeneas finally slays
Turnus, dismissing an initial impulse to spare him.
Drancës
A Latin leader who desires an end to the Trojan-Latin
struggle. Drancës questions the validity of Turnus’s
motives at the council of the Latins, infuriating Turnus.
Camilla
The leader of the Volscians, a race of warrior maidens.
Camilla is perhaps the only strong mortal female
character in the epic.
Juturna
Turnus’s sister. Juno provokes Juturna into inducing a
full-scale battle between the Latins and the Trojans by
disguising herself as an officer and goading the Latins
after a treaty has already been reached.
Achates
A Trojan and a personal friend of Aeneas.
GODS AND GODDESSES
Juno
The queen of the gods, the wife and sister of Jupiter,
and the daughter of Saturn. Juno (Hera in Greek
mythology) hates the Trojans because of the Trojan
Paris’s judgment against her in a beauty contest. She is
character li s t
Amata
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character l is t
also a patron of Carthage and knows that Aeneas’s
Roman descendants are destined to destroy Carthage.
She takes out her anger on Aeneas throughout the epic,
and in her wrath acts as his primary divine antagonist.
Venus
The goddess of love and the mother of Aeneas. Venus
(Aphrodite in Greek mythology) is a benefactor of the
Trojans. She helps her son whenever Juno tries to hurt
him, causing conflict among the gods. She is also
referred to as Cytherea, after Cythera, the island where
she was born and where her shrine is located.
Jupiter
The king of the gods, and the son of Saturn. While the
gods often struggle against one another in battles of
will, Jupiter’s will reigns supreme and becomes
identified with the more impersonal force of fate.
Therefore, Jupiter (also known as Jove, and called Zeus
in Greek mythology) directs the general progress of
Aeneas’s destiny, ensuring that Aeneas is never
permanently thrown off his course toward Italy.
Jupiter’s demeanor is controlled and levelheaded
compared to the volatility of Juno and Venus.
Neptune
God of the sea, and generally an ally of Venus and
Aeneas. Neptune (Poseidon in Greek mythology) calms
the storm that opens the epic and conducts Aeneas
safely on the last leg of his voyage.
Mercury
The messenger god. The other gods often send Mercury
(Hermes in Greek mythology) on errands to Aeneas.
Aeolus
The god of the winds, enlisted to aid Juno in creating
bad weather for the Trojans in Book I.
Cupid
A son of Venus and the god of erotic desire. In Book I,
Cupid (Eros in Greek mythology) disguises himself as
Ascanius, Aeneas’s son, and causes Dido to fall in love
with Aeneas.
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Allecto
One of the Furies, or deities who avenge sins, sent by
Juno in Book IV to incite the Latin people to war
against the Trojans.
Vulcan
God of fire and the forge, and husband of Venus.
Venus urges Vulcan (Hephaestus in Greek mythology)
to craft a superior set of arms for Aeneas, and the gift
serves Aeneas well in his battle with Turnus.
Saturn
The father of the gods. Saturn (Chronos in Greek
mythology) was king of Olympus until his son Jupiter
overthrew him.
Minerva
The goddess who protects the Greeks during the
Trojan War and helps them conquer Troy. Like Juno,
Minerva (Pallas Athena in Greek mythology) is
motivated against the Trojans by the Trojan Paris’s
judgment that Venus was the most beautiful among
goddesses.
Apollo
A son of Jupiter and god of the sun. Apollo was born at
Delos and helps the Trojans in their voyage when they
stop there. Because he is often portrayed as an archer,
many characters invoke his name before they fire a
shaft in battle.
CHARACTERS FROM HOMER’S ILIAD
RELEVANT TO THE AENEID
Ulysses
The hero of Homer’s Odyssey, and one of the captains
of the Greek army that takes Troy. Ulysses (Odysseus
in Greek lore), like Aeneas, must make a long and
treacherous voyage before he finds home again, and
references to his whereabouts in the Aeneid help situate
Aeneas’s wanderings in relation to Ulysses’.
character li s t
Tiberinus The river god associated with the Tiber River, where
Rome will eventually be built. At Tiberinus’s
suggestion, Aeneas travels upriver to make allies of the
Arcadians.
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Achilles
The greatest of the Greek warriors. Achilles slew the
Trojan hero Hector during the war and is the tragic
hero of the Iliad.
Hector
The greatest of the Trojan warriors, killed at Troy.
Hector is in some ways a parallel figure to Turnus, who
also defends his native city to the death.
Andromachë Hector’s wife, who survives the siege of Troy.
Andromachë meets Aeneas in his wanderings, tells him
her story, and advises his course to Italy.
Paris
A Trojan prince, son of Priam and Hecuba, and brother
of Hector. The handsomest of men, Paris is asked to
judge which goddess is most beautiful: Venus, Juno, or
Minerva. Venus promises him Helen as his wife in
exchange for his judgment, so Paris selects Venus. This
selection inspires the permanent wrath of Juno against
the Trojans. Stealing Helen from her Greek husband,
Menelaus, Paris provokes the Trojan War.
Helen
The most beautiful of mortal women and wife of
Menelaus. Helen’s abduction to Troy by Paris sparks
the Trojan War.
Menelaus A Greek king who wed Helen and made a pact with her
other suitors to fight anyone who tried to steal her.
When Paris took Helen, the pact was invoked and the
Trojan War began.
Agamemnon The leader of the Greek army at Troy, and the king
of Argos, a city in Greece. Upon his return from the
war, Agamemnon is killed by his adulterous wife,
Clytemnestra.
Priam
The king of Troy. Priam is slain before Aeneas’s eyes
during the Greeks’ sacking of Troy.
Pyrrhus
The son of Achilles. Pyrrhus, also called Neoptolemus,
appears in Aeneas’s account of the siege of Troy as the
brutal murderer of Priam and Priam’s sons.
Analysis of Major
Characters
AENEAS
13
character analys i s
As the son of the Trojan mortal Anchises and Venus, the goddess of
beauty and erotic love, Aeneas enjoys a special divine protection. He
is chosen to survive the siege of Troy and to lay the foundations in
Italy for the glory of the Roman Empire. In the Aeneid, Aeneas’s fate
as Rome’s founder drives all the action, and the narrative constantly
points out that Aeneas’s heroism owes as much to his legacy as to his
own actions. Aeneas serves as the vehicle through which fate carries
out its historical design.
As a Trojan leader, Aeneas respects prophecy and attempts to
incorporate the idea of his own destiny into his actions, in spite of
emotional impulses that conflict with his fated duties. His ability to
accept his destined path despite his unhappiness in doing so makes
him a graceful hero and a worthy recipient of the honor and favor
the gods bestow upon him. His compassion for the sufferings of others, even in conjunction with a single-minded devotion to his duty,
is another aspect of his heroism. Sympathetic to the weariness of
others on the journey, he delivers speeches to his fleet to keep the
men’s spirits high.
Aeneas’s personal investment in the future of Rome increases as
the story progresses. The events of Book V, in which the Trojans sail
away from Carthage toward Italy, and Book VI, in which Aeneas
visits his father in the realm of the dead, depict Aeneas’s growth as a
leader. In Book V, he shows his sympathy for the woes of others by
allowing the crippled and unwilling to stay behind. He also grows in
compassion in the underworld when he observes the lot of the
unburied dead. He carries these lessons into the war that follows,
taking care to ensure the proper burial of both ally and enemy.
When, in the underworld, Aeneas’s father, Anchises, presents a
tableau of the events that will lead to Rome’s pinnacle, Aeneas
comes to understand his historical role with greater clarity and
immediacy. The scenes depicted later in the epic on the shield made
by Vulcan further focus Aeneas’s sentiments and actions toward his
character analysis
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destined future. There are moments, of course, when Aeneas seems
to lose track of his destiny—particularly during his dalliance with
Dido in Carthage. Aeneas is recalled to his duty in this case not by a
long historical vision, but by an appeal from Jupiter to his obligation to his son, Ascanius, to whom Aeneas is devoted.
Even prior to Virgil’s treatment of the Trojan War, Aeneas held
a place in the classical tradition as a figure of great piety, just as
Ulysses was known for his cunning and Achilles for his rage in battle. The value Aeneas places on family is particularly evident in the
scene in which he escorts his father and son out of Troy, bearing
his elderly father on his back. He behaves no less honorably
toward the gods, earnestly seeking to find out their wishes and
conform to them as fully as possible. His words to Dido in
Books IV and VI express his commitment to obey fate rather than
indulge his feelings of genuine romantic love. This subordination
of personal desire to duty defines Aeneas’s character and earns him
the repeated moniker “pious Aeneas.” His behavior contrasts with
Juno’s and Turnus’s in this regard, as those characters both fight
fate every step of the way.
DIDO
Before Aeneas’s arrival, Dido is the confident and competent ruler
of Carthage, a city she founded on the coast of North Africa. She is
resolute, we learn, in her determination not to marry again and to
preserve the memory of her dead husband, Sychaeus, whose murder at the hands of Pygmalion, her brother, caused her to flee her
native Tyre. Despite this turmoil, she maintains her focus on her
political responsibilities.
Virgil depicts the suddenness of the change that love provokes
in the queen with the image of Dido as the victim of Cupid’s
arrow, which strikes her almost like madness or a disease. Dido
tells her sister that a flame has been reignited within her. While
flames and fire are traditional, almost clichéd images associated
with love, fire is also a natural force of destruction and uncontrollable chaos. Dido risks everything by falling for Aeneas, and when
this love fails, she finds herself unable to reassume her dignified
position. By taking Aeneas as a lover, she compromises her
previously untainted loyalty to her dead husband’s memory.
She loses the support of Carthage’s citizens, who have seen their
queen indulge an amorous obsession at the expense of her civic
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TURNUS
Turnus is a counterpart to Dido, another of Juno’s protégés who
must eventually perish in order for Aeneas to fulfill his destiny. Both
Turnus and Dido represent forces of irrationality in contrast to
Aeneas’s pious sense of order. Dido is undone by her romantic desire,
Turnus by his unrelenting rage and pride. He is famous for courage
and skill in battle, and justly so: he has all the elements of a hero.
What distinguishes Turnus from Aeneas, besides his unmitigated
fury in battle, is his willfulness. He tries to carve out his own understanding of history with his prediction of his own success, based on
the events of the Trojan past, as told in Homer’s Iliad. Though Turnus may appear to us a Latin version of Achilles, the raging hero of
the Iliad, Turnus’s powers as a warrior are not enough to guarantee
him victory. Jupiter has decreed another destiny for Turnus, an outcome Turnus refuses to accept. Turnus’s interpretation of signs and
omens is similarly stubborn. He interprets them to his own advantage rather than seeking their true meaning, as Aeneas does.
Turnus’s character changes in the last few battle scenes, when we
see him gradually lose confidence as he comes to understand and
character analys i s
responsibilities. Further, by dallying with another foreigner, Dido
alienates the local African chieftains who had approached her as
suitors and now pose a military threat. Her irrational obsession
drives her to a frenzied suicide, out of the tragedy of her situation
and the pain of lost love, but also out of a sense of diminished possibilities for the future.
Dido plays a role in the first four books of the epic similar to
that which Turnus plays at the end. She is a figure of passion and
volatility, qualities that contrast with Aeneas’s order and control,
and traits that Virgil associated with Rome itself in his own day.
Dido also represents the sacrifice Aeneas makes to pursue his duty.
If fate were to allow him to remain in Carthage, he would rule a
city beside a queen he loves without enduring the further hardships
of war. Aeneas encounters Dido’s shade in the underworld just
before the future legacy of Rome is revealed to him, and again he
admits that his abandonment of the queen was not an act of his
own will. This encounter with lost love, though poignant, is
dwarfed by Anchises’ subsequent revelation of the glory of Rome.
Through Dido, Virgil affirms order, duty, and history at the
expense of romantic love.
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accept his tragic fate. He is angry earlier when Juno tries to protect
him by luring him out of the battle and onto a ship. In this episode
she humiliates him, making him look like a coward rather than the
hero he so desperately wants to be. By the final scenes, however, his
resistance to the aid of Juturna, his sister, is motivated no longer by
a fiery determination to fight but by a quiet resolve to meet his fate
and die honorably.
Themes, Motifs &
Symbols
THEMES
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored
in a literary work.
The Primacy of Fate
The Sufferings of Wanderers
The first half of the Aeneid tells the story of the Trojans’ wanderings
as they make their way from Troy to Italy. Ancient culture was oriented toward familial loyalty and geographic origin, and stressed the
idea that a homeland is one’s source of identity. Because homeless17
themes
The direction and destination of Aeneas’s course are preordained,
and his various sufferings and glories in battle and at sea over the
course of the epic merely postpone this unchangeable destiny. The
power of fate stands above the power of the gods in the hierarchy of
supernatural forces. Often it is associated with the will of Jupiter,
the most powerful of the Olympians. Because Jupiter’s will trumps
the wills of all others, the interference in Aeneas’s life by the lesser
gods, who strive to advance their personal interests as much as they
can within the contours of the larger destiny, do not really affect the
overall outcome of events.
The development of individual characters in the epic is apparent
in the readiness and resistance with which they meet the directives of
fate. Juno and Turnus both fight destiny every step of the way, and
so the epic’s final resolution involves a transformation in each of
them, as a result of which they resign themselves to fate and allow
the story, at last, to arrive at its destined end. Dido desires Aeneas,
whom fate denies her, and her desire consumes her. Aeneas preserves his sanity, as well as his own life and those of his men, by subordinating his own anxieties and desires to the demands of fate and
the rules of piety. Fate, to Virgil’s Roman audience, is a divine, religious principle that determines the course of history and has culminated in the Roman Empire.
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themes
ness implies instability of both situation and identity, it is a form of
suffering in and of itself. But Virgil adds to the sufferings of the wandering Trojans by putting them at the mercy of forces larger than
themselves. On the sea, their fleet buffeted by frequent storms, the
Trojans must repeatedly decide on a course of action in an uncertain
world. The Trojans also feel disoriented each time they land on an
unknown shore or learn where they are without knowing whether it
is the place where they belong. As an experience that, from the point
of view of the Trojans, is uncertain in every way, the long wanderings at sea serve as a metaphor for the kind of wandering that is characteristic of life in general. We and Virgil’s Roman audience know
what fate has in store for the Trojans, but the wandering characters
themselves do not. Because these individual human beings are not
always privy to the larger picture of destiny, they are still vulnerable
to fears, surprises, desires, and unforeseen triumphs.
The Glory of Rome
Virgil wrote the Aeneid during what is known as the Golden Age of
the Roman Empire, under the auspices of Rome’s first emperor,
Caesar Augustus. Virgil’s purpose was to write a myth of Rome’s
origins that would emphasize the grandeur and legitimize the success of an empire that had conquered most of the known world. The
Aeneid steadily points toward this already realized cultural pinnacle; Aeneas even justifies his settlement in Latium in the same manner that the empire justified its settlement in numerous other foreign
territories. Virgil works backward, connecting the political and
social situation of his own day with the inherited tradition of the
Greek gods and heroes, to show the former as historically derived
from the latter. Order and good government triumph emphatically
over the Italian peoples, whose world prior to the Trojans’ arrival is
characterized as a primitive existence of war, chaos, and emotional
irrationality. By contrast, the empire under Augustus was generally
a world of peace, order, and emotional stability.
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MOTIFS
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices
that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Prophecies and Predictions
Founding a New City
The mission to build a new city is an obsession for Aeneas and the
Trojans. In Book II, Aeneas relates the story of Troy’s destruction to
Dido, who is herself recently displaced and in the process of founding a new city of her own. In Book III, Virgil relates several attempts
undertaken by the Trojans to lay the foundations for a city, all of
which were thwarted by ill omens or plague. Aeneas also frequently
uses the image of the realized city to inspire his people when their
spirits flag. The walls, foundation, or towers of a city stand for civilization and order itself, a remedy for the uncertainty, irrationality,
and confusion that result from wandering without a home.
Vengeance
Avenging a wrong, especially the death of a loved one, is an important element of heroic culture and a pervasive motif in the Aeneid.
The most prominent instance of vengeance comes in the final lines
of the poem. Aeneas, having decided to spare Turnus, changes his
mind when reminded of the slain Pallas, whose belt Turnus wears as
a trophy. It would be considered dishonorable and disloyal to allow
Pallas’s death go unpunished. Vengeance comes in other, perhaps
less noble, forms as well. Dido’s suicide is at least partly an act of
revenge on Aeneas, and she curses him as one of her last acts. The
moti fs
Prophecy and prediction take many forms in the Aeneid, including
dreams, visitations from the dead, mysterious signs and omens, and
direct visitations of the gods or their divine messengers. These windows onto the future orient mortal characters toward fate as they
try to glean, sometimes clearly and sometimes dimly, what is to
come. Virgil’s audience, however, hears these predictions with the
advantage of hindsight, looking backward to observe the realization of an already accomplished fate. As observers who know about
the future, the audience is in the same position as the gods, and the
tension between the audience’s and the characters’ perspectives
therefore emulates the difference between the position of mortals
and that of gods.
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Harpies act out of vengefulness when they curse Aeneas for having
killed their livestock. Similarly, the struggles of the gods against one
another are likewise motivated by spite and revenge: the history of
bruised vanity, left over from Paris’s judgment of Venus as the fairest goddess, largely motivates Juno’s aggressive behavior against the
Trojans and Venus, their divine protector.
SYMBOLS
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to
represent abstract ideas or concepts.
s ymbols
Flames
Fire symbolizes both destruction and erotic desire or love. With
images of flames, Virgil connects the two. Paris’s desire for Helen
eventually leads to the fires of the siege of Troy. When Dido confesses her love for Aeneas to Anna, her sister, she begins, “I recognize / the signs of the old flame, of old desire” (IV.31–32). Dido also
recalls her previous marriage in “the thought of the torch and the
bridal bed” (IV.25). Torches limit the power of flames by controlling them, but the new love ignited in Dido’s heart is never regulated
by the institution of marriage, “the bridal bed.” The flames she feels
do not keep her warm but rather consume her mind. Virgil describes
the way she dies in the synonymous terms “enflamed and driven
mad” (IV.965).
The Golden Bough
According to the Sibyl, the priestess of Apollo, the golden bough is
the symbol Aeneas must carry in order to gain access to the underworld. It is unusual for mortals to be allowed to visit the realm of the
dead and then return to life. The golden bough is therefore the sign
of Aeneas’s special privilege.
The Gates of War
The opening of these gates indicates a declaration of war in a tradition that was still recognized even in Virgil’s own day. That it is
Juno rather than a king or even Turnus who opens the gates emphasizes the way immortal beings use mortals to settle scores. The Gates
of War thus symbolize the chaos of a world in which divine force,
often antagonistic to the health and welfare of mortals, overpowers
human will and desire.
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The Trojan Hearth Gods
The hearth gods of Troy, or penates as they are called in Latin, are
mentioned repeatedly throughout the epic. They are symbols of
locality and ancestry, tribal gods associated specifically with the city
of Troy, who reside in the household hearth. Aeneas gathers them
up along with his family when he departs from his devastated home,
and they symbolize the continuity of Troy as it is transplanted to a
new physical location.
Weather
s ymbols
The gods use weather as a force to express their will. The storm that
Juno sends at the beginning of the epic symbolizes her rage. Venus,
on the other hand, shows her affection for the Trojans by bidding
the sea god, Neptune, to protect them. In Book IV, Venus and Juno
conspire to isolate Dido and Aeneas in a cave by sending a storm to
disrupt their hunting trip, symbolizing the rupture of normal social
codes as well. Greek and Roman mythology has a tendency to make
its symbols literal in this way—to connect the seen (a storm, for
example) with the unseen (divine will) causally and dramatically.
Summary & Analysis
BOOK I
Summary
I sing of warfare and a man at war.
...
He came to Italy by destiny. (See quotations, p. 59)
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Virgil opens his epic poem by declaring its subject, “warfare and a
man at war,” and asking a muse, or goddess of inspiration, to
explain the anger of Juno, queen of the gods (I.1). The man in question is Aeneas, who is fleeing the ruins of his native city, Troy, which
has been ravaged in a war with Achilles and the Greeks. The surviving Trojans accompany Aeneas on a perilous journey to establish a
new home in Italy, but they must contend with the vindictive Juno.
Juno harbors anger toward Aeneas because Carthage is her
favorite city, and a prophecy holds that the race descended from the
Trojans will someday destroy Carthage.
Juno holds a permanent grudge against Troy because another
Trojan, Paris, judged Juno’s rival Venus fairest in a divine beauty
contest. Juno calls on Aeolus, the god of the winds, directing him to
bring a great storm down upon Aeneas as he sails south of Sicily in
search of a friendly harbor. Aeolus obeys, unleashing a fierce storm
upon the battle-weary Trojans.
Aeneas watches with horror as the storm approaches. Winds and
waves buffet the ships, knocking them off course and scattering
them. As the tempest intensifies, Neptune, the god of the sea, senses
the presence of the storm in his dominion. He tells the winds that
Aeolus has overstepped his bounds and calms the waters just as
Aeneas’s fleet seems doomed. Seven ships remain, and they head for
the nearest land in sight: the coast of Libya. When they reach the
shore, before setting out to hunt for food, a weary and worried
Aeneas reminds his companions of previous, more deadly adversities they have overcome and the fated end toward which they strive.
Meanwhile, on Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, Aeneas’s
mother, Venus, observes the Trojans’ plight and begs Jupiter, king
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of the gods, to end their suffering. Jupiter assures her that Aeneas
will eventually find his promised home in Italy and that two of
Aeneas’s descendants, Romulus and Remus, will found the mightiest empire in the world. Jupiter then sends a god down to the people
of Carthage to make sure they behave hospitably to the Trojans.
Aeneas remains unaware of the divine machinations that steer
his course. While he is in the woods, Venus appears to him in disguise and relates how Dido came to be queen of Carthage. Dido’s
wealthy husband, Sychaeus, who lived with her in Tyre (a city in
Phoenicia, now Syria), was murdered for his gold by Pygmalion, her
brother. Sychaeus appeared to Dido as a ghost and advised her to
leave Tyre with those who were opposed to the tyrant Pygmalion.
She fled, and the emigrant Phoenicians settled across the sea in
Libya. They founded Carthage, which has become a powerful city.
Venus advises Aeneas to go into the city and talk to the queen,
who will welcome him. Aeneas and his friend Achates approach
Carthage, shrouded in a cloud that Venus conjures to prevent them
from being seen. On the outskirts of the city, they encounter a shrine
to Juno and are amazed to behold a grand mural depicting the
events of the Trojan War. Their astonishment increases when they
arrive in Dido’s court to find many of their comrades who were lost
and scattered in the storm asking Dido for aid in rebuilding their
fleet. Dido gladly grants their request and says that she wishes she
could meet their leader. Achates remarks that he and Aeneas were
clearly told the truth regarding their warm welcome, and Aeneas
steps forward out of the cloud. Dido is awestruck and delighted to
see the famous hero. She invites the Trojan leaders to dine with her
in her palace.
Venus worries that Juno will incite the Phoenicians against her
son. She sends down another of her sons, Cupid, the god of love,
who takes the form of Aeneas’s son, Ascanius. In this disguise,
Cupid inflames the queen’s heart with passion for Aeneas. With love
in her eyes, Dido begs Aeneas to tell the story of his adventures during the war and the seven years since he left Troy.
Analysis
Virgil adheres to the epic style that the ancient Greek poet Homer
established by invoking the muse at the opening of his poem. A similar invocation begins both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric
epics that are the models for Virgil’s epic, and the Aeneid picks up its
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subject matter where Homer left off. The events described in the
Aeneid form a sequel to the Iliad and are contemporaneous with the
wanderings of Ulysses in the Odyssey.
Although Virgil alludes to Homer’s epics and self-consciously
emulates them, he also attempts to surpass and revise Homer, and
the differences between the two authors’ epics are important markers of literary evolution. Whereas the Iliad and the Odyssey call the
muse in the first line, Virgil begins the Aeneid with the words “I
sing,” and waits a number of lines before making his invocation. It
is as though Virgil is invoking the muse out of obligation rather than
out of a genuine belief in divine inspiration. He emphasizes his presence as a narrator and becomes more than a medium through which
the epic poem is channeled.
The hero at sea, buffeted by weather and impeded by unexpected
encounters, is another recurring motif in epic poetry. According to
the Roman worldview, which was derived from the Greeks, men’s
actions and fortunes are compelled by a unitary fate, and the specific
events of their lives are dictated by a host of competing supernatural
forces. Aeneas, sailing from the ruins of Troy toward Italy, is not
completely in control of his direction and progress. Fate has
ordained, we learn, that Aeneas and his people will found a new
race in Italy that will eventually become the Roman Empire. Jupiter
ensures this outcome, and none of the gods can prevent it from happening. They can, however, affect the way in which it happens, and
the rivalries and private loyalties of the meddling gods fuel the conflict in the poem.
The reasons for Juno’s hatred of the Trojans and her enduring
antagonism would have been well known to Virgil’s Roman audience, which was familiar with the Greek tradition. Homer details
the background of Juno’s resentment against Troy in the Iliad. The
goddess of strife, Eris, threw a golden apple before the goddesses on
Olympus and said it was a prize for the most beautiful among them.
Three goddesses claimed it: Juno, Venus, and Minerva. They
decided to have Paris, a Trojan and the most handsome of mortal
men, settle the dispute. In secret, each goddess tried to bribe him,
and in the end, he gave the apple to Venus because she offered the
most tempting bribe: the fairest woman on Earth, Helen. That
Helen was already married to a Greek king named Menelaus only
engendered further conflict. When Paris took her away to Troy, her
husband assembled the bravest warriors of the Argives (Greeks)—
including his brother Agamemnon, Ulysses, and Achilles—and they
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set sail for Troy, initiating the Trojan War. They laid siege to the city
for ten years, and, naturally, the goddesses took sides. Juno and
Minerva aided the Greeks, and Venus helped the Trojans, to whom
she had an added loyalty since the Trojan warrior Aeneas is her son.
This rivalry between the gods looms over the narrative of the
Aeneid so heavily that at times the story seems to be less about the
deeds of the mortal characters than about the bickering of the gods,
who continually disrupt and manipulate events on Earth. One of the
Aeneid’s main themes, though, is that for both gods and mortals,
fate always wins in the end. Aeneas is destined to settle in Italy, and
not even the unbridled wrath of Juno, queen of the gods, can prevent this outcome. Jupiter, whose inexorable will is closely identified with fate because he is the highest of the gods, sees to it that his
overall plan comes to pass. When Juno has Aeolus torment Aeneas,
it is necessary for Jupiter to take sides, so he assists Venus. In fact,
Jupiter’s occasional intervention on Venus’s behalf, to Juno’s great
frustration, sets the general pattern for the Aeneid.
Whereas Juno attempts to defy fate to satisfy her own anger,
Aeneas reveals in his first speech in the epic, delivered to his crew
upon their landing in Libya, his ability to suppress his own emotions
and will in pursuit of his fated duty. Virgil tells us that Aeneas has
“contained his anguish” and “feigned hope” in order to rally the
morale of his crew by reminding them of past hardships and future
glory (I.285–286). He is incapable of emotional self-indulgence. For
Aeneas, fate, although promised, demands certain actions and sacrifices. It requires the virtue known as piety, which entails placing
his service to fate—his divine mission to found a new city in Italy—
above all else in his life.
BOOK II
Summary
Did you suppose, my father,
That I could tear myself away and leave you?
(See quotations, p. 61)
Fulfilling Dido’s request, Aeneas begins his sorrowful story, adding
that retelling it entails reexperiencing the pain. He takes us back to
ten years into the Trojan War: at the moment the tale begins, the
Danaans (Greeks) have constructed a giant wooden horse with a
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hollow belly. They secretly hide their best soldiers, fully armed,
within the horse, while the rest of the Greek army lies low some distance from Troy. The sight of a massive horse standing before their
gates on an apparently deserted battlefield baffles the Trojans.
Near the horse, the Trojans find a Greek youth named Sinon.
He explains that the Greeks have wished to flee Troy for some time
but were prevented by fierce storms. A prophet told them to sacrifice one of their own, and Sinon was chosen. But Sinon managed
to escape during the preparations, and the Greeks left him behind.
The Trojans show him pity and ask the meaning of the great horse.
Sinon says that it was an offering to the goddess Minerva, who
turned against the Greeks after the desecration of one of her temples by Ulysses. Sinon claims that if any harm comes to the wooden
statue, Troy will be destroyed by Minerva’s wrath, but if the Trojans install the horse within their city walls, they will rise victorious in war against southern Greece, like a tidal wave, with
Minerva on their side.
Aeneas continues his story: after Sinon finishes speaking, two
giant serpents rise up from the sea and devour the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons as punishment for hurling a spear at the
horse. The snakes then slither up to the shrine of Minerva. The Trojans interpret the snakes’ attack as an omen that they must appease
Minerva, so they wheel the horse into the city of Troy.
Night falls, and while the city sleeps, Sinon opens the horse’s
belly, releasing the Greek warriors. The warriors kill the Trojan
guards and open the gates of the city to the rest of their forces.
Meanwhile, Hector, the fallen leader of the Trojan army, appears to
Aeneas in a dream and informs him that the city has been infiltrated.
Climbing to his roof, Aeneas sees fighting everywhere and Troy in
flames. He runs for arms and then heads for the heart of the city,
joined by a few of his men.
Aeneas and his men surprise and kill many Greeks, but are too
badly outnumbered to make a difference. Eventually they go to King
Priam’s palace, where a battle is brewing. The Greeks, led by Pyrrhus, break into the palace. Pyrrhus kills Polites, the young son of
Priam and Hecuba, and then slaughters Priam on his own altar.
Aeneas continues relating his story: nearly overcome with grief
over this slaughter, he sees Helen, the cause of the war, hiding. He
determines to kill her, but Venus appears and explains that blame
for the war belongs with the gods, not Helen. Venus advises Aeneas
to flee Troy at once, since his fate is elsewhere. Aeneas then proceeds
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to the house of his father, Anchises, but Anchises refuses to leave.
But after omens appear—first a harmless tongue of flame on Ascanius’s forehead, then a bright falling star in the sky—Anchises is
persuaded to flee the city.
Aeneas takes his father on his back and flees with his wife, Creusa,
his son, Ascanius, and many other followers. Unfortunately, in the
commotion Creusa is lost from the group. After everyone exits the
city, Aeneas returns to search for her, but instead he meets her shade,
or spirit. She tells him not to be sorrowful because a new home and
wife await him in Hesperia. Somewhat comforted, Aeneas leaves
Troy burning and leads the survivors into the mountains.
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Analysis
With Aeneas’s claim that his tale of Troy’s fall is so sorrowful that it
would bring tears even to the eyes of a soldier as harsh as Ulysses,
Virgil calls attention to his own act of retelling the Trojan horse episode from a new angle, that of the vanquished Trojans. In Homer’s
Iliad and Odyssey, we learn the story of the Trojan War from the
perspective of Ulysses and the Greeks. Virgil’s claim is that even the
Greeks, the victors, would be able to feel the sorrow of the event if it
were told properly from the point of view of the victims. Virgil
writes a characteristically evenhanded account, so that both losers
and winners earn our sympathy and respect.
Virgil tries to minimize the humiliation of the Trojans and of his
hero, Aeneas. He makes sure that Aeneas does not appear to be less
of a warrior than the Greeks, even though they defeated him. When
Aeneas admits that the Trojans were duped by the wooden horse
trick, Virgil tempers the failure by emphasizing that not all Trojans
were fooled. Aeneas’s mention that some Trojans counseled the others to destroy the horse demonstrates that there was in fact a degree
of wisdom and perhaps even foresight among the Trojan people. He
also carefully recounts all the details by which they were persuaded
and frightened—the lies of the young Greek and the sign of the serpents, which gobbled up Laocoön, the man who had most vocally
protested bringing the horse inside the city—in order to show that
the Trojan fear of offending the gods was valid. In the end, the Trojans bring the horse into their city not out of foolishness but out of
a legitimate and even honorable respect for the gods. Against
Aeneas’s description of the Trojans’ earnest reverence, the Greeks
begin to look guilty of bad sportsmanship.
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BOOK III
Summary
Aeneas continues his story, recounting the aftermath of the fall of
Troy. After escaping from Troy, he leads the survivors to the coast
of Antander, where they build a new fleet of ships. They sail first to
Thrace, where Aeneas prepares to offer sacrifices. When he tears at
the roots and branches of a tree, dark blood soaks the ground and
the bark. The tree speaks to him, revealing itself to be the spirit of
Polydorus, son of Priam. Priam had sent Polydorus to the king of
Thrace to be safe from the war, but when Troy fell, the Thracian
king sided with the Greeks and killed Polydorus.
After holding a funeral for Polydorus, Aeneas and the Trojans
embark from Thrace with a sense of dread at the Thracian violation
of the ethics of hospitality. They sail southward to the holy island of
Delos. At Delos, Apollo speaks to Aeneas, instructing him to go to
the land of his ancestors. Anchises interprets Apollo’s remark as a
reference to the island of Crete, where one of the great Trojan forefathers—Teucrus, after whom the Trojans are sometimes called
Teucrians—had long ago ruled.
Aeneas and his group sail to Crete and began to build a new city,
but a terrible plague soon strikes. The gods of Troy appear to Aeneas
in a dream and explain that his father is mistaken: the ancestral land
s ummary & analys i s
At points during his story, Aeneas emphasizes the irrelevance of
mortal concerns in the face of divine will. Venus’s persuasion of
Aeneas to not kill Helen, for instance, relies on the ultimate inability
of mortals to influence their destinies. Venus tells him to hold neither Helen nor Paris responsible for Troy’s downfall: he must realize
that “the harsh will of the gods” (II.792) caused Troy’s destruction.
Venus’s words reveal that although Aeneas and the Trojans lose a
battle with the Greeks that they might have won, in the end they
have no choice but to submit to the unfavorable will of the gods. But
the gods’ will is also what enables some of the Trojans to escape
from Troy. Again, fate must always be fulfilled: Aeneas is destined
to survive. His sufferings in Troy are to be redeemed, eventually, by
his glory in Italy. The shade of his wife, Creusa, comforts him with
this message, and following his encounter with Creusa’s shade,
Aeneas keeps his foretold destiny always in mind, distant though
this destiny may seem.
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to which Apollo referred is not Crete but Italy, the original home of
Dardanus, from whom the Trojans take the name Dardanians.
These hearth gods also reassert the prophecy of Roman supremacy,
declaring, “You must prepare great walls for a great race” (III.223).
The Trojan refugees take to the sea again. A cover of black storm
clouds hinders them. They land at the Strophades, islands of the
Harpies, fierce bird-creatures with feminine faces. The Trojans
slaughter many cows and goats that are roaming free and hold a
feast, provoking an attack from the Harpies. To no avail, the Trojans attempt to fight the Harpies off, and one of the horrible creatures places a curse upon them. Confirming that they are destined
for Italy, she prophesies that the Trojans will not establish their city
until hunger forces them to try to eat their very tables.
Disturbed by the episode, the Trojans depart for the island of
Leucata, where they make offerings at a shrine to Apollo. Next, they
set sail in the direction of Italy until they reach Buthrotum, in Chaonia. There, Aeneas is astonished to discover that Helenus, one of
Priam’s sons, has become king of a Greek city. Helenus and Andromachë had been taken by Pyrrhus as war prizes, but seized power
over part of their captor’s kingdom after he was killed.
Aeneas meets Andromachë and she relates the story of her and
Helenus’s captivity. Helenus then arrives and advises Aeneas on the
path ahead. Andromachë adds that to reach the western coast of
Italy it is necessary to take the long way around Sicily, to the south.
The short path, a narrow gap of water between Sicily and Italy, is
rendered practically impossible to navigate by two potentially lethal
hazards: Charybdis, a whirlpool, and Scylla, a six-headed monster.
Following Andromachë’s instructions, Aeneas pilots his fleet
along the southern coast of Italy to Sicily, where Mount Etna is
erupting in the distance. Resting on a beach, the Trojans are startled
by a ragged stranger who begs to be taken aboard. He was in the
Greek army under Ulysses, and his crew was captured by a giant
Cyclops on Sicily and barely escaped alive. He reports that Ulysses
stabbed the monster in his one eye to allow their escape.
As the stranger finishes telling the Trojans his tale, the blinded
Cyclops nearly stumbles upon the group. The Trojans make a quick
escape with the Greek straggler, just as the other Cyclopes come
down to the shore. Sailing around Sicily, they pass several recognizable landmarks before landing at Drepanum, where Aeneas endures
yet another unexpected loss: his father’s death.
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Aeneas turns to Dido and concludes his story by saying that
divine will has driven him to her shores.
Analysis
s ummary & analys i s
Although we know from Book I that the Trojans have been wandering for seven years, Aeneas, in telling his story, gives little explicit
indication of the passage of time. Instead, the time frame is revealed
in an indirect way by the situations the Trojan refugees encounter
on their journey. In Book I, we see that there is already a mural in
Carthage picturing the events of the Trojan War by the time
Aeneas’s crew arrives there. Historically, the Trojan War and the
founding of Carthage were separated by centuries, not years,
though the epic tradition has compressed this time span. We also see
Helenus and Andromachë, in a moment that comes even before
Aeneas’s arrival in Carthage, and we learn that Pyrrhus, whom we
last saw killing Priam, is now dead himself. Such details give us a
sense that greater lengths of time have passed than the seafaring
hero’s description of his various arrivals and departures can convey.
Aeneas’s path across the Mediterranean is not straight, and his
fleet is frequently thrown off course or sent backtracking by the
gods. He has to wait for summer before he can even set off from the
coast of Antander, outside of Troy, and he must wait for auspicious
weather each time he takes to the sea. Aeneas indicates the length of
time he spends on Crete, where the Trojans actually begin to establish a new city, when he describes the period as “a year of death”
(III.195). Such lengthy stops account for the passage of so many
years between the departure of the refugees from Troy, on the coast
of Asia Minor, and their landfall in Libya, near Carthage.
By the end of Book III, we have heard the prophecy that Aeneas
is destined to found the race that will become the Roman people
reiterated several times, each time with some additional—and often
ambiguous—information. Aeneas’s fate is set, but Virgil makes the
role of fate complex, so that his hero’s success in each adventure
does not always seem a foregone conclusion. The dangers that
Aeneas and his crew encounter are real threats, even if we know that
he will survive them.
The Trojan destiny is more flexible and alterable than it might
seem, at least in a limited sense. There is no set time span that binds
the workings of fate regarding Aeneas or prevents considerable
delays on the way to Italy. The gods, who know what fate ultimately
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holds for Aeneas, still try to alter his path, knowing that they can
assist him or cause him suffering along the way. It becomes obvious,
in the case of the Harpy’s curse, that the actions of the Trojans themselves, and not only those of the gods, can affect what they will have
to endure. The fleeing Trojans, in a sense, try to take the easy way
out—they keep looking for the nearest place to settle and make a new
life. This urgent craving for stability is probably what causes
Anchises to misinterpret Apollo’s message, when he steers the group
south from Delos to nearby Crete instead of Italy. In the end, though,
Virgil’s message is that fate is inevitable and demands obedience.
The more one tries to delay or avoid fate, the more one suffers. At
every wrong turn Aeneas and his men take, they endure another
hardship that eventually puts them back on the path to Italy.
A general overview of what happens to some of the major figures
of the Trojan War after the fall of Troy is helpful in understanding
some of the references in Book III. Pyrrhus the Greek, son of Achilles, took back two Trojans to be his slaves: Helenus, son of Priam,
and Andromachë, widow of Hector. Helenus and Andromachë
were soon married, though the latter continued to mourn Hector,
her lost husband. Pyrrhus married Hermione, the daughter of
Menelaus and Helen, born before Helen was taken to Troy. Unfortunately for Pyrrhus, Hermione had already been betrothed to
Orestes, the son of Agamemnon. Orestes came and killed Pyrrhus,
whose kingdom fell to Helenus. Thus, Helenus and Andromachë
came to be rulers of a Greek city. This whole series of events is
described in the Oresteia, a famous trilogy of plays by Aeschylus. As
for the other Greek generals, Menelaus and Ulysses were both
forced to delay their homecomings as punishment for wrongs committed in the sacking of Troy. Menelaus took eight years to return to
Sparta, while Ulysses did not reach Ithaca for ten long years, as
recounted by Homer in the Odyssey. Virgil solidifies the link
between these stories by having Aeneas stop on the shore of Sicily,
right where the Greeks had stopped, and actually encounter a member of Ulysses’ crew who was left behind.
BOOK IV
Summary
The flame of love for Aeneas that Cupid has lit in Dido’s heart only
grows while she listens to his sorrowful tale. She hesitates, though,
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because after the death of her husband, Sychaeus, she swore that she
would never marry again. On the other hand, as her sister Anna
counsels her, by marrying Aeneas she would increase the might of
Carthage, because many Trojan warriors follow Aeneas. For the
moment, consumed by love, Dido allows the work of city building
to fall by the wayside.
Juno sees Dido’s love for Aeneas as a way to keep Aeneas from
going to Italy. Pretending to make a peace offering, Juno suggests to
Venus that they find a way to get Dido and Aeneas alone together. If
they marry, Juno suggests, the Trojans and the Tyrians would be at
peace, and she and Venus would end their feud. Venus knows Juno
is just trying to keep the Trojans from Italy but allows Juno to go
ahead anyway.
One day when Dido, her court, and Aeneas are out hunting, Juno
brings a storm down upon them to send the group scrambling for
shelter and arranges for Aeneas and Dido to wind up in a cave by
themselves. They make love in the cave and live openly as lovers
when they return to Carthage. Dido considers them to be married
though the union has yet to be consecrated in ceremony. Anxious
rumors spread that Dido and Aeneas have surrendered themselves
entirely to lust and have begun to neglect their responsibilities as rulers.
When Jupiter learns of Dido and Aeneas’s affair, he dispatches
Mercury to Carthage to remind Aeneas that his destiny lies elsewhere and that he must leave for Italy. This message shocks
Aeneas—he must obey, but he does not know how to tell Dido of his
departure. He tries to prepare his fleet to set sail in secret, but the
queen suspects his ploy and confronts him. In a rage, she insults him
and accuses him of stealing her honor. While Aeneas pities her, he
maintains that he has no choice but to follow the will of the gods: “I
sail for Italy not of my own free will” (IV.499). As a last effort, Dido
sends Anna to try to persuade the Trojan hero to stay, but to no avail.
Dido writhes between fierce love and bitter anger. Suddenly, she
appears calm and instructs Anna to build a great fire in the courtyard. There, Dido says, she can rid Aeneas from her mind by burning all the clothes and weapons he has left behind and even the bed
they slept on. Anna obeys, not realizing that Dido is in fact planning
her own death—by making the fire her own funeral pyre. As night
falls, Dido’s grief leaves her sleepless. Aeneas does sleep, but in his
dreams, Mercury visits him again to tell him that he has delayed too
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long already and must leave at once. Aeneas awakens and calls his
men to the ships, and they set sail.
Dido sees the fleet leaving and falls into her final despair. She can
no longer bear to live. Running out to the courtyard, she climbs
upon the pyre and unsheathes a sword Aeneas has left behind. She
throws herself upon the blade and with her last words curses her
absent lover. As Anna and the servants run up to the dying queen,
Juno takes pity on Dido and ends her suffering and her life.
s ummary & analys i s
Analysis
Although her relationship with Aeneas spans only this one book of
the Aeneid, Dido has become a literary icon for the tragic lover, like
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Though at times Aeneas’s happiness in his love for Dido seems to equal hers, it is with considerably
less grief and anxiety that he is able to leave her in Carthage and go
back about the business of bringing the survivors of Troy to Italy
and founding Rome. Whereas Dido not only loves Aeneas but hopes
he and his warriors will strengthen her city, Aeneas’s actions are the
result of a momentary abandonment of his true duties and responsibilities. He indulges temporarily in romance and the pleasures of the
flesh, but when Jupiter, through Mercury, reminds Aeneas of his
destiny, he is dutiful and ready to resume his mission.
When Aeneas says good-bye to Dido, we see two sides to the hero
as in Book I, when he hides his worries to appear brave before his
crew. Aeneas’s statement that he is forced to sail to Italy and Virgil’s
remark that Aeneas “struggle[s] with desire to calm and comfort
[Dido] in all her pain” demonstrate Aeneas’s conflicted nature
(IV.546–547). He piously carries out the duties allotted him by fate;
though he feels emotions and experiences desires, he is powerless to
act on them. From Virgil’s perspective, Aeneas is not heartless, as
Dido thinks him, but merely capable of subordinating matters of the
heart to the demands of duty. Aeneas’s reminder to Dido that they
were never officially married suggests, somewhat dubiously, that
had they entered into such an ordained commitment he would not
leave. But, he argues, without a true marriage, he is sacrificing only
his own desires by leaving Dido.
Virgil treats love as he treats the gods—as an outside force acting
upon mortals, not a function of the individual’s free will or innate
identity. He does not idealize love; rather, he associates it with imagery linked to madness, fire, or disease, presenting love as a force that
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BOOK V
Summary
Massive storm clouds greet the Trojan fleet as it embarks from
Carthage, hindering the approach to Italy. Aeneas redirects the
ships to the Sicilian port of Eryx, where his friend and fellow Trojan
Acestes rules. After landing and being welcomed by Acestes, Aeneas
realizes that it is the one-year anniversary of his father’s death. He
proposes eight days of sacrificial offerings and a ninth day of competitive games, including rowing, running, javelin, and boxing, in
honor of his father.
s ummary & analys i s
acts on Dido with a violence that is made literal by the end of Book IV
in her suicide. Virgil’s language in the first lines of the book indicates
that Dido’s emotions corrode her self-control; he describes her love
as “inward fire eating her away” (IV.3). Later, Dido’s decision to
have a funeral pyre erected and then kill herself upon it returns to this
imagery, and Virgil compares Dido’s suicide to a city taken over by
enemies, “As though . . . / . . . / Flames billowed on the roofs of men
and gods” (IV.927–929). Cupid’s arrow, shot to promote love
between Aeneas and Dido, causes hatred, death, and destruction.
Love is at odds with law and fate, as it distracts its victims from
their responsibilities. While with Aeneas, Dido abandons her construction of Carthage. She even admits to Aeneas that her own subjects have grown to hate her because of her selfish actions. Aeneas,
too, must move on because the time he spends with Dido only keeps
him from his selfless task of founding an empire.
In the Aeneid, civic responsibility resides with the male. An attitude that might be termed misogynistic seeps into Virgil’s descriptions of Juno and even Dido. Aeneas’s dream-vision of Mercury
articulates this sentiment: “woman’s a thing / forever fitful and forever changing” (IV.792–793). Virgil clearly enjoys making Juno
look foolish, and he also likes to depict Juno’s vain efforts in comic
terms as a domestic quarrel—a battle of wills between husband
and wife played out before an audience that knows Jupiter has the
power in the divine family. Dido also shows herself to be less
responsible than her partner. Whereas Dido kills herself for love,
leaving the city she founded without a leader, Aeneas returns to his
course, guiding the refugees of a lost city to the foundation of a
new city.
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When the ninth day arrives, the festivities begin with a rowing
race. Four galleys participate, each piloted by one of Aeneas’s captains and manned by many eager youths. A suitable distance is
marked off along the coastline and the race starts, with many spectators cheering from the beaches. Gyas, piloting the ship Chimaera,
leads during the first half of the race. But at the turnaround point,
his helmsman takes the turn too wide, and his boat falls behind.
Down the final stretch, Sergestus takes the lead, but plows into the
rocks. Colanthus and Mnestheus race together to the finish, but
Colanthus prays to Neptune, who causes him to win. Lavish prizes
are bestowed upon the competitors—even upon Sergestus, after he
dislodges his ship from the rocks.
Next comes the footrace. Nisus leads for most of the way, but slips
on sacrificial blood near the finish. Euryalus wins the race, but
Aeneas, as generous as before, hands out prizes to all the competitors. Next, the mighty Trojan Dares puts on his gauntlets (heavy
fighting gloves) and challenges anyone to box with him. No one rises
to the challenge at first, but Acestes finally persuades his fellow Sicilian Entellus—a great boxer now past his prime—to step into the ring.
They begin the match, pounding each other with fierce blows.
Younger and more agile, Dares darts quicker than Entellus. When he
dodges a punch from Entellus, Entellus tumbles to the ground. Entellus gets up, though, and attacks Dares with such fierceness that
Aeneas decides to call an end to the match. Entellus backs off, but to
show what he could have done to Dares, he kills a bull—the prize—
with a single devastating punch that spills the beast’s brains.
Next, the archery contest commences. Eurytion wins by shooting
a dove out of the sky, but Acestes causes a spectacular stir when his
arrow miraculously catches fire in midair. Finally, the youths of
Troy and Sicily ride out on horseback to demonstrate their technique. They charge at each other in a mock battle exercise, impressing their fathers with their skill and audacity.
Meanwhile, Juno’s anger against the Trojans has not subsided.
She dispatches Iris, her messenger, down to the Trojan women, who
are further along the beach from where the men enjoy their sport.
Iris stirs them to riot, playing on their fear of further journey and
more battles. She distributes flaming torches among them, inciting
them to burn the Trojan ships so that the men will be forced to build
their new city here, in Sicily. Persuaded, the angry women set fire to
the fleet. The Trojan men see the smoke and rush up the beach. They
douse the ships with water but fail to extinguish the flames. Finally,
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Analysis
Neptune’s last strike at Palinurus seems a ridiculous impulse of
divine vanity: Neptune harbors no explicit anger against the Trojans and has no interest in delaying their destiny, yet he requires the
death of Palinurus as a price for safe passage. It is unclear why Neptune needs to be pacified at all—he is calm and gentle in his talk with
Venus. They conduct their dealings with the tone of a friendly business transaction, and the bloodshed incurred seems gratuitous and
irrational, demonstrating yet again how the whims of the gods have
grave consequences for mortal affairs.
The games on the shores of Eryx serve as a diversion both for us
and for Aeneas and his crew. After four books of foul weather,
destruction, suffering, and suicide, sport provides a lighthearted
interlude. The games provide comic moments, as when Gyas gets
stuck in the shoals and tosses his helmsman overboard, or when
Nisus, in order to throw the race for his friend, Euryalus, slips on
blood during the footrace, putting himself in the path of Salius. Such
moments of lightness are rare in the Aeneid; Virgil fairly consis-
s ummary & analys i s
Aeneas prays to Jupiter to preserve the fleet, and immediately a rainstorm hits, ending the conflagration.
The incident shakes Aeneas, and he ponders whether he should
be satisfied with settling in peace on the Sicilian coast. His friend
Nautes, a seer, offers better advice: they should leave some Trojans—the old, the frail, the injured, and the women weary of sailing—in the care of Acestes. Aeneas considers this plan, and that
night the ghost of his father appears to him, advising him to listen to
Nautes. The spirit also tells him that Aeneus is going to have to fight
a difficult foe in Latium, but must first visit the underworld to speak
more with Anchises.
Aeneas does not know the meaning of his father’s mysterious
prediction, but the next day he describes it to Acestes, who consents
to host those who do not wish to continue to Italy after the Trojan
fleet departs. Venus, fearing more tricks from Juno, worries about
the group’s safety at sea. She pleads with Neptune to let Aeneas
reach Italy without harm. Neptune agrees to allow them safe passage across the waters, demanding, however, that one of the crew
perish on the voyage, as a sort of sacrifice for the others. On the voyage, Palinurus, the lead captain of Aeneas’s fleet, falls asleep at the
helm and falls into the sea.
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tently maintains a solemn tone. In addition to providing comic
relief, these sequences allow Virgil to display his poetic skill in creating excitement and suspense. He uses interjections and imperatives to draw us into the races:
s ummary & analys i s
But close upon him, look,
Diores in his flight matched stride for stride,
Nearing his shoulder.
(V.412–414)
Virgil does not often break from the formal, epic style associated
with the genre of tragedy, but this style does not always encompass
the range of emotions that he wishes to portray. Above all, Virgil
excels at representing universal passions, and here he portrays the
passion for sport and physical competition. Any athlete can relate
to the comic frustration of the losers, the triumphant gloating of
the winners, the fervent displays of masculinity, and the irreverent
enthusiasm of the spectators. The games matter little to the plot as
a whole, but they show a more lighthearted facet of Virgil’s artistry—one that is welcome after Dido’s suicide, one of the epic’s
darkest passages.
The goddesses Juno and Venus continue their quarrel by meddling further in the journey of the weary Trojans. The gods, not the
hero, drive the plot—Aeneas has been reduced to a responsive role.
A low point in terms of morale occurs when, to stop the burning of
his fleet, Aeneas begs Jupiter to help him or end his life. Virgil’s hero
has reached the limit of psychological suffering in the face of divine
mistreatment that he perceives to be arbitrary. That Aeneas goes so
far as to consider ignoring the fates and settling in Sicily simply to
end this weary journey indicates how tired and perhaps powerless
he feels. But the importance of stoic persistence is one of the
Aeneid’s messages, and Aeneas decides to go on, his strength
renewed by the visit of Anchises’ spirit.
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BOOK VI
Summary
Roman, remember by your strength to rule
...
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.
(See quotations, p. 62)
s ummary & analys i s
At last, the Trojan fleet arrives on the shores of Italy. The ships drop
anchor off the coast of Cumae, near modern-day Naples. Following
his father’s instructions, Aeneas makes for the Temple of Apollo,
where the Sibyl, a priestess, meets him. She commands him to make
his request. Aeneas prays to Apollo to allow the Trojans to settle in
Latium. The priestess warns him that more trials await in Italy:
fighting on the scale of the Trojan War, a foe of the caliber of the
Greek warrior Achilles, and further interference from Juno. Aeneas
inquires whether the Sibyl can gain him entrance to Dis, so that he
might visit his father’s spirit as directed. The Sibyl informs him that
to enter Dis with any hope of returning, he must first have a sign. He
must find a golden branch in the nearby forest. She instructs him
that if the bough breaks off the tree easily, it means fate calls Aeneas
to the underworld. If Aeneas is not meant to travel there, the bough
will not come off the tree.
Aeneas looks in dismay at the size of the forest, but after he says
a prayer, a pair of doves descends and guides him to the desired tree,
from which he manages to tear the golden branch. The hero returns
to the priestess with the token, and she leads him to the gate of Dis.
Just inside the gate runs the river Acheron. The ferryman Charon
delivers the spirits of the dead across the river; however, Aeneas
notices that some souls are refused passage and must remain on the
near bank. The Sibyl explains that these are the souls of dead people
whose corpses have not received proper burial. With great sadness,
Aeneas spots Palinurus among the undelivered. Charon explains to
the visitors that no living bodies may cross the river, but the Sibyl
shows him the golden branch. Appeased, Charon ferries them
across. On the other side, Aeneas stands aghast, hearing the wailing
of thousands of suffering souls. The spirits of the recently deceased
line up before Minos for judgment.
Nearby are the Fields of Mourning, where suicides wander.
There, Aeneas sees Dido. Surprised and saddened, he speaks to her,
s ummary & analys i s
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with some regret, claiming that he left her not of his own will. The
shade of the dead queen turns away from him toward the shade of
her husband, Sychaeus, and Aeneas sheds tears of pity.
Aeneas continues to the field of war heroes, where he sees many
casualties of the Trojan War. The Greeks flee at first sight of him.
The Sibyl urges Aeneas onward, and they pass an enormous fortress. Inside the fortress, Rhadamanthus doles out judgments upon
the most evil of sinners, and terrible tortures are carried out. Finally,
Aeneas and the Sibyl come to the Blessed Groves, where the good
wander about in peace and comfort. At last, Aeneas sees his father.
Anchises greets him warmly and congratulates him on having made
the difficult journey. He gladly answers some of Aeneas’s many
questions, regarding such issues as how the dead are dispersed in
Dis and how good souls can eventually reach the Fields of Gladness.
But with little time at hand, Anchises presses on to the reason for
Aeneas’s journey to the underworld—the explication of his lineage
in Italy. Anchises describes what will become of the Trojan descendants: Romulus will found Rome, a Caesar will eventually come
from the line of Ascanius, and Rome will reach a Golden Age of rule
over the world. Finally, Aeneas grasps the profound significance of
his long journey to Italy. Anchises accompanies Aeneas out of Dis,
and Aeneas returns to his comrades on the beach. At once, they pull
up anchor and move out along the coast.
Analysis
Aeneas’s journey to the underworld in Book VI is another of the
Aeneid’s most famous passages. In fact, this passage helped raise
Virgil to the status of a Christian prophet in the Middle Ages. In the
fourteenth century, the Italian poet Dante used it as the foundation
for his journey through hell in the Inferno, even though Virgil’s version of the afterlife was obviously not a Christian one. Like Virgil,
for example, Dante designed a hell with many sections and in which
more severe punishments are handed down to those with greater
sins. Also like Virgil, Dante exercised his formidable imagination in
inventing penalties for sinners. While Virgil’s Dis is pre-Christian, it
represents an advanced version of classical theology, which was not
codified in the way that modern religions are. In a world of temperamental gods who demand sacrifice and seem to dispense punishments and rewards almost arbitrarily, Virgil portrays an afterlife in
which people are judged according to the virtue of their lives on
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Earth. This scheme of the afterlife is an idea that Christianity fused
with the Judaic tradition into the Western consciousness centuries
later, but that has its sources in the Orphic mysteries of classical
antiquity. The presence of Orpheus, “priest of Thrace,” in the
Blessed Groves confirms the influence of Orphism, which was also a
source for Plato’s views of the afterlife, on Virgil’s vision of the land
of shades.
Rhadamanthus’s practice of listening to sinners and then sentencing them is remarkably similar to the Christian conception of
judgment after death: souls who fail to repent for their sins on Earth
pay more dearly for them in hell. Of course, one major difference is
that Virgil does not have a separate equivalent of Christian heaven.
All souls migrate to Dis, and the good ones occupy a better place, the
Fields of Gladness, within the grand dungeon. However, in a way
this scheme still fits with Christian theology, which postulates that
before Christ’s death and resurrection, all souls—good or bad—
went to hell. To a Christian mindset, then, it was theologically accurate for Virgil, who died nineteen years before Christ’s birth, to
place even the good souls in Dis. Though this connection may seem
tenuous to us, Virgil’s influence among Christian poets and scholars
increased because of these affinities.
Aeneas’s trip to the underworld is also Virgil’s opportunity to
indulge in an extensive account of Rome’s future glory, particularly
in his glorification of the Caesars. Virgil renders Augustus—his own
ruler and benefactor—the epitome of the Roman Empire, the promised ruler who presides over the Golden Age. That Augustus was a
patron of Virgil should not necessarily cause us to dismiss these passages as pure propaganda, however. Virgil had good reason to think
he was living at the high point of history—after all, Rome ruled
most of the known world and seemed invincible. In this context,
Augustus emerges as the natural counterpart to Aeneas, bringing to
perfect fruition the city whose history the Trojan hero initiated.
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BOOK VII
Summary
s ummary & analys i s
Amata tossed and turned . . .
...
While the infection first, like dew of poison
Fallen on her, pervaded all her senses.
(See quotations, p. 63)
Sailing up the coast of Italy, the Trojans reach the mouth of the
Tiber River, near the kingdom of Latium. Virgil, invoking the muse
once again to kick off the second half of his epic narrative, describes
the political state of affairs in Latium. The king, Latinus, has a single
daughter, Lavinia. She is pursued by many suitors, but the great
warrior Turnus, lord of a nearby kingdom, appears most eligible for
her hand. Worried by a prophet’s prediction that a foreign army will
conquer the kingdom, Latinus consults the Oracle of Faunus. A
strange voice from the oracle instructs the king that his daughter
should marry a foreigner, not a Latin.
Meanwhile, Aeneas and his captains are eating on the beach,
with fruit spread out on flat, hard loaves of bread. They finish the
fruit but are still hungry, so they eat the bread that they have used as
tables. Ascanius notes with a laugh that they have indeed eaten their
tables, thus fulfilling the Harpies’ curse in a manner less dire than
anticipated. Aeneas recognizes that they have arrived at their promised land. The next day, he sends emissaries to King Latinus,
requesting a share of the land for the foundation of a new city. Latinus offers territory as well as something extra—mindful of the oracle’s words, he suggests that Aeneas take the hand of Lavinia in
matrimony. Latinus recognizes that accepting fate, even if it means
that the Trojans will one day rule his kingdom, proves a safer course
than resisting destiny.
Juno, however, still has not exhausted her anger against the Trojans. Unable to keep them from Italian shores forever, she vows at
least to delay the foundation of their city and to cause them more
suffering. She dispatches Allecto, one of the Furies, to Latium to
rouse anger on the part of the natives against the Trojans. First,
Allecto infects Queen Amata, Latinus’s wife, causing her to oppose
the marriage of Lavinia and Aeneas. Virgil describes Allecto’s rousing of Amata’s anger with the metaphor of a snake that twists and
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Analysis
The Trojans’ landing in Latium begins the epic’s second half. The
Aeneid demands comparison to the epics of Homer: whereas the
first half of Virgil’s epic—a chronicle of the wanderings of Aeneas
and his crew in the wake of the fall of Troy—takes up the themes of
the Odyssey, the second six books share the martial themes of the
Iliad. In these later books, Virgil describes the strife that leads to the
unification of the Latin peoples. Virgil’s second invocation to the
muse marks this division. Beginning in Book VII, Virgil dwells with
more careful attention on the geography of the region he describes.
He knows that these locations are familiar to his contemporary
Roman audience, and will reinforce their sense of historical connection to the legendary events of the narrative.
Virgil also incorporates an interesting element of Roman lore
into the beginning of the war between the Latins and Trojans. Historically, whenever the Romans prepared to march into battle
against an enemy, they would open the Gates of War—enormous
gates of brass and iron that were constructed as a tribute to Mars,
the god of war. Opening these gates, they believed themselves to be
releasing the Furies, who inflame the hearts of soldiers and drive
them into the fray with a passion for death—the polytheistic version
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winds itself around Amata’s body. Then Allecto approaches Turnus
and inflames him with indignation at the idea of losing Lavinia and
submitting to a Trojan king.
Turnus assembles his army and prepares to drive the Trojans out
of Italy. Shepherds prove the first to bear arms. As a result of Juno’s
meddling, Ascanius sets off to hunt in the woods and fells a stag that
happens to be a favorite pet of Latinus’s herdsman. The animal staggers back to his master before dying. The herdsman summons the
other shepherds to track down the hunter, and the Trojans, sensing
a commotion, come to Ascanius’s aid. Many Latins are slain in a
brief skirmish, then each side retreats temporarily. The shepherds go
before King Latinus, carrying the dead, and plead with him to
launch an all-out assault on the Trojans. Latinus does not wish to
engage in battle, but all the court—even his own wife—clamor for
war. In the end, he throws up his hands and retreats to his chambers,
feeling unable to stop what the gods have set in motion. Turnus
amasses a great army, captained by the greatest warriors in Italy,
and marches them to war.
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of a battle cry. Virgil claims that this tradition already existed in the
time of Aeneas. Generally, the king opens the gates, but since Latinus is unwilling—as he has opposed the war from the start—Juno
descends to open the gates herself. At this moment, Turnus, whom
the Fury Allecto has already infected with bloodlust, gathers his
company to march out and confront the Trojans.
Even though Juno openly admits for the first time that she cannot
win, she persists in her defiance of the fates. She cannot prevent the
Trojans from founding a new city, yet she remains fixed in her determination to inflict suffering on them. She says:
It will not be permitted me—so be it—
To keep the man from rule in Italy;
By changeless fate Lavinia waits, his bride.
And yet to drag it out, to pile delay
Upon delay in these great matters—that
I can do: to destroy both countries’ people,
That I can do.
(VII.427–433)
At this point in the narrative, Virgil has imparted Juno with base
emotions that, in their extremity, seem beyond human capacity. Her
obsession with revenge drives her to hurt Aeneas, though she
acknowledges the futility of the violence she incites with phrases
such as “[i]t will not be permitted me” and “changeless fate.” For
Juno, thwarting the Trojans is no longer a matter of control but
rather of pride, as her resolute assertion, “That I can do,” makes
clear. Virgil’s Juno, a fearsome, self-important, and vengeful character from the start, reaches the height of her anger in this passage and
appears pathetic in her willful obstruction of fated events.
BOOK VIII
Summary
While Turnus gathers his forces, Aeneas readies the Trojan troops
and solicits support from nearby cities in Latium. Still, he is troubled at his prospects in battle. That night, the river god Tiberinus
speaks to him and tells him to approach and form an alliance with
the Arcadians, who are also at war with the Latins. Aeneas takes
two galleys and rows several days up the Tiber to the forest of the
Arcadians. There, the Trojans address the Arcadian king, Evander,
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Analysis
After many books in which we see Aeneas being alternately tormented at the hands of Juno and rescued by Venus and her allies, the
fates begin to balance out. A veritable coalition of immortals now
fortifies Aeneas for the coming campaign: he receives help from the
gods Tiberinus, Venus, and Vulcan. Tiberinus helps Aeneas by telling him how to find help from a mortal, King Evander. Evander’s
immediate recognition of Aeneas—Evander knew Anchises and
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who gladly offers aid against their common enemy and invites
Aeneas to a feast.
After the feast, holy rites are performed in honor of Hercules, the
patron of the Arcadians, who killed the monster Cacus near where
Arcadia now stands. Evander also explains how Saturn descended
to Italy long ago and formed a nation from the wild savages who
inhabited the land, calling it Latium. The Arcadians still dwell in relative simplicity. Even Evander boasts only a small house but offers
everything at his disposal to Aeneas in hospitality.
Meanwhile, Venus frets over Aeneas’s upcoming war. She speaks
to her husband, Vulcan, the god of fire and forging, and persuades
him to make Aeneas new weapons and armor that will give him an
added advantage. Vulcan commands his workers—Cyclopes inside
the great volcano Etna—to begin forging the items.
The next morning, back in Arcadia, King Evander assigns what
troops he can spare to Aeneas’s command. He also bids neighboring
kingdoms to send their aid. All told, several thousand soldiers are
rallied to accompany the Trojans back to the front, but due to their
increased numbers, they must march rather than row, which causes
a delay. Finally, Evander dispatches Pallas, his own son, and
requests that Aeneas teach Pallas the arts of war and return him
home in safety.
The new army marches all day. At the camp that night, Venus
suddenly appears to Aeneas and presents him with the arms that
Vulcan has completed: helmet, corselet, sword, spear, and shield, all
of them beautifully crafted and stronger than metal forged by
humans. The face of the shield is particularly notable, for on it Vulcan has depicted the story of the Roman glory that awaits Italy.
Aeneas sees Romulus being nursed by the she-wolf, the defeat of the
Gauls, Caesar Augustus as he defeats Antony and Cleopatra at the
battle of Actium, and much else.
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notices the family resemblance—prompts him to offer his hand
without hesitation to form a pact with Aeneas. This gesture of automatic trust and loyalty is founded both on Aeneas’s reputation and
on his family lineage, two elements of character that rank among the
highest values of heroic culture. The Trojans obtain the reinforcements they need in large part because they are recognized and even
expected—their coming has been heralded in prophecy far and
wide. Everywhere they tread, the famous name of Troy earns them
respect and hospitality.
The rich description of Aeneas’s shield parallels Homer’s
description, in the Iliad, of the shield that Vulcan—known in the
Iliad by his Greek name, Hephaestus—makes for Achilles. By emulating Homer, Virgil responds to and attempts to surpass the
Greek tradition with the Roman. This desire to surpass was also
evident in Augustan Rome, the Golden Age during which Virgil
wrote, as the Roman Empire strove to outshine the accomplishments of ancient Greece. Aeneas’s taking up of the new armor also
symbolizes the way he symbolically shoulders the whole weight of
the destiny of Rome.
Like Anchises’ speech in Book VI, Virgil’s description of the
mural on the shield Vulcan forges for Aeneas promotes the Roman
legend and stresses Augustus’s position as the culmination of that
legend. Repeating some of the scenes that Anchises describes in the
underworld, Virgil particularly emphasizes the contrast between
Romulus’s humble beginnings and Caesar’s far-reaching glory. As
before, Virgil compresses the many centuries that separate Romulus
from Augustus into a few lines, which heightens the impact of the
contrast.
This rags-to-riches progression is a good tool for Virgil because it
parallels the Aeneid’s plot: Aeneas and his followers leave Troy as
refugees without a home, but go on to found a new and greater city
in Italy. The city that the Trojans eventually establish—to be called
Lavinium, after Lavinia—is not the site of Rome. Centuries later,
Rome will be built by Romulus and Remus further up the Tiber,
near where the Arcadians dwell when Aeneas approaches them to
form an alliance. Aeneas’s excursion away from the main scene of
action brings him to the land that will become Rome. To Roman
audiences, this powerful geographic connection would make more
concrete their understanding of Aeneas as the founding father of
their civilization.
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BOOK IX
Summary
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Never one to miss an opportunity, Juno sends her messenger, Iris,
down from Olympus to inform Turnus that Aeneas is away from his
camp. With their leader gone, the Trojans are particularly vulnerable to an attack, so Turnus immediately leads his army toward the
enemy camp. The Trojans spot the army coming and secure themselves inside their newly constructed fortress, unwilling to risk an
open battle while Aeneas is away. Finding no obvious weakness in
their defenses, Turnus decides to circumnavigate the camp and set
fire to the defenseless ships anchored on the shore.
The fleet’s destruction seems inevitable, but an old blessing prevents the ships’ incineration. At the fleet’s construction, Cybele—
mother of the gods and sister of Saturn—requested her son Jupiter to
render the vessels immortal because they were built of wood from
trees in her sacred forest. As Turnus and his troops watch the ships
burn, the vessels suddenly pull loose of their anchors, submerge , and
reappear as sea nymphs. This sign vexes the Latins, but Turnus
remains confident and determined to complete his annihilation of
the Trojans, portents from the gods notwithstanding. Night falls,
and the Latins make camp around the Trojan fortress.
The Trojans know that they must send reports of the Latins’
movements to Aeneas quickly. Nisus and Euryalus, two friends eager
for glory and adventure, volunteer to sneak out in the dark of night.
The Trojan captains applaud the bravery of the two men. Quietly
leaving the fortress, the two find the entire Latin army fast asleep.
They pull their swords and begin slaughtering many great captains.
When daylight approaches, they finally make their way toward the
woods, but not before Euryalus takes the high helmet of a dead Latin
captain as a prize. As they approach the forest, a group of enemy
horsemen returning to camp through the woods sees the helmet flash
in the distance, and rides toward the two Trojans. Nisus manages to
escape into the woods, but the horsemen capture Euryalus. Nisus
rushes back to save his friend, but in the end both are killed. The Latins put the heads of the two Trojans on stakes and parade them
before the Trojan fortress, to the dismay of those inside.
Then the Latins attack. They cross the trenches surrounding the
Trojan fortress and try to identify a weak spot in the walls, holding
up their shields to block the barrage of spears that the Trojans hurl
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down from above. There is a high tower standing just outside the
main gate, which Turnus lights on fire. Turnus and his men collapse
the tower, killing many Trojans inside. The Trojans within the fortress begin to panic, but Ascanius renews their hope, getting his first
taste of war when he fires an arrow through the head of Remulus,
one of the Latin captains. Their confidence renewed, the Trojans
open the gates and surprise the Latins by rushing out in attack,
inflicting many Latin casualties in one quick strike. Unfortunately
for the Trojans, Turnus joins the fray, suppresses the Trojans’ surge,
and begins to force them to retreat to the fortress. The Trojan Pandarus, observing the turning tide of battle, quickly shuts the gates
again, allowing as many of his comrades as possible back inside—
but letting Turnus through as well. Finally inside the enemy camp,
the Latin leader kills Trojans as though it were an easy game. Eventually, though, Turnus is outnumbered, and narrowly escapes by
jumping into the Tiber and floating back out to his comrades.
Analysis
Throughout the poem, interventions on the part of the immortals
tend to be spontaneous, responding to mortal affairs as they unfold.
But Virgil’s contention, while describing the burning Trojan fleet,
that the fleet is immune to fire because of Cybele’s blessing reads as
a contrived act of retroactive deus ex machina. Deus ex machina literally means “god from the machine,” and it is a device used to diffuse or solve a seemingly impossible situation by means of the
spontaneous act of a divine hand. It is strange that we are not told
about the immunity of the ships beforehand, given that we are told,
for instance, that when the Trojans eat their own tables they will
know they have arrived at their final destination.
Even stranger is the fact that the miraculous transformation of
the Trojan ships into sea nymphs, though the result of a god’s work,
does not benefit the Trojans at all. Sea nymphs are not fit for sailing,
so the Trojans lose their fleet despite divine intervention on their
behalf. The Latins ultimately accomplish their mission of rendering
the Trojan fleet useless, meaning that the Trojans are unable to flee
the battle by sailing back out to sea. They are now grounded, and it
is certain that the events of the epic are to be played out on Italian
soil. Aesthetically, the transformation of the Trojan ships into sea
nymphs is a sublime ending to the journey of a fleet of vessels that,
from the epic’s inception, has been buffeted by constant torments
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and trials. To go down in flames while at anchor ashore would be a
fate unworthy of ships that have endured such harshness at sea.
Their underwater metamorphosis proves their status as heroic
objects of war.
Virgil flirts with the defeat of the Trojans when, after Turnus
gains access to the Trojan fortress, the author claims that if it had
occurred to Turnus to open the gates and let his awaiting forces into
the citadel, the Latins would have won the war then and there. By
pointing to the possibility of other outcomes, Virgil heightens the
dramatic import of the battle and establishes the Latins as worthy
enemies. At the same time, this comment suggests that Turnus is not
as amazing as he may seem, as it points out a shortcoming in his cunning and strategy.
In Book IX, Virgil foregrounds the parallels between the Aeneid
and the Iliad. Turnus, for example, openly claims to be in the same
predicament as the Greek king Menelaus—a Trojan has swept away
Turnus’s bride, Lavinia, just as the Trojan Paris made off with
Menelaus’s bride, Helen, thus bringing about the Trojan War. Turnus boasts that the Latins will not need to use the trickery of a
wooden horse, as Odysseus did to gain entrance to Troy. Rather, he
claims, the Latins will defeat the Trojans outright. Knowing the destined outcome of the war, we see that Turnus spells out his doom
here: there may be similarities between the Greek-Trojan conflict
and the Latin-Trojan conflict, but their outcomes will not be the
same. The gods have offered clear signs that the conflict will turn in
Aeneas’s favor, but Turnus chooses to ignore them, denying any
faith in the oracles of his demise. Turnus is a fearsome warrior who
is either too assured of his own ability—a quality that, when combined with defiance of divine powers, is known as hubris—or is
resigned to his role as a pure destructive obstacle to the Trojans. He
hints at the latter sentiment when he cries, “I have my fate as well, to
combat theirs” (IX.190).
The ill-fated journey of the eager young soldiers Nisus and Euryalus provides a poignant counterpoint to the Trojans’ success at
staving off the fortress’s siege. Their youthful bravery is extinguished because of Euryalus’s desire for prizes before the completion of their mission. They could easily kill a few Latins and still
make it into the forest in good time. Instead, Euryalus concerns himself with the spoils of battle, enabling the Latins to capture him.
Nisus’s willingness to sacrifice his own life for his friend is noble but
largely useless, as he does not manage to save Euryalus but does
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manage to stab Euryalus’s killer as he falls to his own death. Following this intense and emotional episode, Virgil offers a brief message
of memorial to these two Trojans, writing:
Fortunate, both [Nisus and Euryalus]!
If in the least my songs
Avail, no future day will ever take you
Out of the record of remembering Time.
(IX.633–636)
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In narrating the episode, Virgil displays his skill at dramatizing the
impulsive, emotional nature of friendship and loyalty. With these
lines to Nisus and Euryalus, he displays his confidence in his work
and legacy, asserting that his poetry can make men immortal.
BOOK X
Summary
From Olympus, Jupiter takes notice of the carnage in Italy. He had
expected the Trojans to settle there peacefully, and he summons a
council of all the gods to discuss the matter. There, Venus blames
Juno for the continued suffering of Aeneas and the Trojans. Juno
angrily responds that she did not force Aeneas to go to Italy.
Annoyed at their bickering, Jupiter decrees that henceforth he will
not help either side, so that the merits and efforts of men will decide
their ends.
Meanwhile, the Latins continue their siege of the Trojan fortress,
and Aeneas journeys back toward the battle. By this point, the army
no longer has to march, because another king, Tarchon of Tuscany,
has provided Aeneas with a fleet of ships, along with many great
warriors to augment his forces. Sped on by the sea nymphs that were
born of the Trojan fleet’s transformation, the new fleet reaches the
beach near the battlefield shortly after dawn. Turnus spots the ships
approaching and leads his troops toward the beach to confront
them. The Trojans disembark, and the battle commences.
Aeneas strikes the first blows, cutting down several of Turnus’s
men. The rest of the soldiers on both sides then fall into the fray, and
blood begins to spill. Pallas leads the Arcadians, fighting fiercely
and tipping the scales in favor of the Trojans. Already a great warrior in spite of his youth, he dispenses death with every blow, but
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Analysis
Jupiter’s declaration that the rest of the battle will be waged entirely
without divine interference comes as a surprise, as up to this point,
humans have not had control over events. Though a divine hand
does reach down once more before the battle’s end when Juno persuades Jupiter to let her save Turnus, Jupiter grants Juno’s request
only because Venus herself is already protecting Aeneas. For the
most part, the outcome of the battle is decided by the valor of the
soldiers themselves.
Yet Jupiter’s suspension of divine influence does not release the
combatants from their fates. Jupiter’s prohibition of interference
only lends weight to the tragedy of the events that follow. By their
own actions, which are determined by their own wills and abilities,
the warriors bring their fates to pass as the conflict plays out.
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attracts the attention of Turnus. Turnus swaggers forth and challenges Pallas alone in the center of the battle. They each toss their
spears. Pallas’s weapon penetrates Turnus’s shield and armor, but
leaves only a flesh wound on Turnus. Turnus’s lance, on the other
hand, tears through Pallas’s corselet and lodges deep in his chest,
killing him. Supremely arrogant after this kill, Turnus reaches down
and rips off Pallas’s belt as a prize.
Word of Pallas’s death reaches Aeneas, who flies into a rage. He
hacks a bloody path through the Latin lines, looking for Turnus and
bent on vengeance. Terrified, some of the Latin soldiers beg on their
knees to be spared, but Aeneas slaughters them mercilessly, and
Turnus’s troops fall into chaos. Up on Olympus, Juno sees that the
battle is lost and asks Jupiter to let her spare Turnus from death.
Jupiter consents, so Juno flies down to the battlefield, disguises herself as Aeneas, and comes within sight of Turnus. He chases her, and
she runs onto one of the ships anchored nearby. Turnus follows, but
as soon as he boards the ship, she severs the moorings and the ship
floats out to sea. Powerless to return to the battlefield, Turnus drifts
until the wind carries him ashore far down the coast.
In Turnus’s absence, the great Latin warrior Mezentius takes up
the fight. He slays many brave Trojans, but loses heart when Aeneas
takes down his son, Lausus. He confronts the Trojan hero and casts
a slew of spears at him, but the shield forged by Vulcan holds strong.
In the end, Aeneas cuts down Mezentius as well, spelling defeat for
the Latin army.
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Ironically, Turnus’s killing of Pallas is the battle’s turning point,
as events then start to shift in the Trojans’ favor. First, Virgil foreshadows the demise of the Latins when he says that by taking the
belt of Pallas—an act of arrogance or hubris—Turnus spells his own
doom. Pallas’s death awakens in Aeneas a passion not witnessed
since the fall of Troy—a mixture of ruthlessness, unrelenting anger,
and hell-bent vengeance. The reappearance of Aeneas as a great
warrior breaks the battle’s stalemate.
Turnus’s humiliation when Juno lures him away from the battle
and onto the ship plays out to the further advantage of the Trojans.
Turnus feels alienated from Juno, as though his advocate has suddenly become his adversary. She protects his person but not his
honor, and impedes him in his single-minded commitment to
behave as a heroic warrior whatever the cost. If the Trojans were to
kill Turnus, their victory would be complete, but the fact that Turnus is involuntarily plucked from the battlefield by his immortal
benefactor represents a moral victory for the Trojans. It boosts their
spirits while deflating the Latins’ pride.
Again in Book X, the Latins draw parallels between themselves
and the Greeks who defeated the Trojans at Troy. This time,
though, they invoke the Greeks as a contrast. The Greeks did not
succeed in eliminating the Trojans altogether, as the Latins intend to
do in Italy. The high irony is that the Latins are correct in saying that
they are not like the Greeks—but primarily because they are not, in
fact, capable of defeating the Trojans. Worse, the Greeks were able
to defeat the Trojans on the Trojans’ own ground; the Latins, on the
other hand, prove incapable of defending their homeland. It is thus
the Trojans, who can be viewed as invaders despite their invitation
from King Latinus, who play the role of the Greeks, winning a war
on enemy turf.
The difference between the Greeks in Troy and the Trojans in
Italy lies in the Trojans’ intention to settle in Italy and found what
will become an empire. When the Greeks sacked Troy, they did so to
reclaim a woman, and, with Helen retrieved, they set sail for home.
Aeneas, on the other hand, must claim rather than reclaim a land,
and he and the Trojans must justify their invasion of Italy by proclaiming the superiority of the race and culture that will result from
the conquest.
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B O O K XI
Summary
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The day after the battle, Aeneas views the body of young Pallas and,
weeping, arranges for 1,000 men to escort the prince’s corpse to
King Evander and to join the king in mourning. When Evander
hears of his son’s death, he is crushed, but because Pallas died honorably, he forgives Aeneas in his heart and wishes only for the death
of Turnus.
Back at the battlefield, messengers arrive from the Latins, who
request a twelve-day truce so that both sides may bury their dead.
Aeneas agrees to the ceasefire. The messengers are impressed with
Aeneas’s piety. They think to themselves that Turnus should settle
the quarrel over Lavinia in a duel with Aeneas to avoid further
battle.
At a council called by King Latinus, others echo the messengers’
sentiment. There, the Latins learn that Diomedes, the great Greek
warrior who fought at Troy and now reigns over a nearby kingdom,
has rejected their plea for aid. Latinus confesses that he does not
think they can win, and proposes the offering of some territory to
the Trojans in exchange for peace. A man named Drancës speaks,
blaming the whole war on Turnus’s arrogance. He claims that the
rest of the Latins have lost the will to fight. The council begins to
turn against Turnus, who, back from his foray on the ship, responds
in anger. He challenges the courage and manhood of Drancës and
Latinus, insulting the former and begging the latter to continue
fighting. Still, Turnus says, if the council wishes him to fight Aeneas
alone, he will do so without fear.
Just at that moment, a messenger arrives to warn the Latins that
the Trojans are marching toward the city. Forgetting their debate,
the Latins rush in a panic to prepare their defenses, joined now by
Camilla, the famous leader of the Volscians, a race of warrior maidens. Turnus hears from a spy that Aeneas has divided his army: the
light horses gallop toward the city while Aeneas and the heavily
armored captains take a slower path through the mountains. Turnus rushes off to lay a trap for the Trojan leader on a particular
mountain path, leaving the defense of the city to Camilla.
Soon the Trojans reach the field in front of the city, and the battle
begins. Camilla proves the fiercest warrior present, scattering
Aeneas’s troops with her deadly spears and arrows. She brings
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down many soldiers before a Tuscan named Arruns catches her off
guard, piercing her with his javelin. Unfortunately for him, the goddess Diana holds Camilla in high favor and dispatches her attendant
Opis down from Olympus to kill Arruns as an act of revenge, cutting his personal victory short.
Having lost their leader in Camilla, the Latin troops scatter and
flee back to the city. Many are killed in the retreat. Meanwhile,
Camilla’s companion Acca goes off to inform Turnus that the Latins
lack a leader. Turnus is forced to return to the city just as Aeneas
passes by the place of the ambush. Aeneas and Turnus return to their
respective armies to make camp as night falls.
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Analysis
With the gods refraining from intervention in Aeneas’s movements,
Aeneas’s words and actions reveal his integrity. His sincere mourning at Pallas’s funeral shows how deeply he appreciates the youth’s
valor in arms and how seriously he took his promise to King
Evander to protect the boy. Aeneas also honorably agrees to a truce
so that the dead of both sides can be properly buried. His earlier
descent to the underworld allows him to witness the terrible fate of
those not properly buried on Earth—they roam the shores of the
river Acheron, without a home and without rest. As a new aspect of
his piety, Aeneas takes up the imperative that no one, not even his
enemies in battle, should endure this awful punishment on his
account.
But Aeneas has not conducted himself entirely as a paragon of
mercy in the struggle with the Latins. In Book X, he mercilessly
kills two Latins who are on their knees, begging him to spare their
lives. In portraying Aeneas as a man who expresses many different
emotional extremes—anger, hatred, passivity, grief, love, and
pious respect—Virgil risks introducing some inconsistencies in his
hero’s character. Of course, it is certainly possible that a man
could be both brutally unforgiving in war and lovingly compassionate at other times. However, our attempt to reconcile these
two contradictory sides of Aeneas’s heroism resembles Dido’s failure to comprehend Aeneas’s expression of love for her just before
his act of abandonment. In both cases, Aeneas’s primary motivations lie in fate and piety, but in the brief moments when fate and
piety do not govern his actions, Aeneas expresses his true emotions
either tenderly or brutally.
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B O O K XI I
Summary
Just so Trojan Aeneas and the hero
Son of Daunus, battering shield on shield,
Fought with a din that filled the air of heaven.
(See quotations, p. 64)
Turnus decides to go and fight Aeneas alone for both the kingdom
and Lavinia’s hand. King Latinus and Queen Amata protest, wanting Turnus to surrender and protect his life, but Turnus ignores
their pleas, valuing his honor over his life. Latinus draws up the
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Turnus’s character remains consistent, if somewhat one-dimensional. He is as stubborn and temperamental as ever. Drancës’
claim that the war is Turnus’s fault holds some truth, for King Latinus has opposed battle from the very beginning. Originally, Turnus claims to be fighting for his promised bride, Lavinia, but in the
council it appears that his own pride has usurped Lavinia as his
motivation. Both Latinus and Drancës insult Turnus by suggesting
that he should be willing to lay down his arms in front of the Trojans after fighting for so long. Turnus’s reply to the council is bitterly sarcastic, adding new depth to his character as he shows
himself to be either ignorant or recklessly defiant. He seems hellbent on destruction, despite the warning signs of the gods in the
earlier battles. He has too much at stake in terms of honor and reputation to give up now.
The action of Book XI suggests that the movement and success
of the armies depend entirely upon visible and active leaders. The
tide turns in battle when a leader either arrives on the scene or
leaves it. When Camilla dies, for example, the Trojans scatter the
Latins. Because the battles in the Aeneid always flow this way, it is
necessary for Virgil, at times, to remove the greatest heroes from
the fighting for a while in order to maintain some suspense—otherwise, Aeneas and Turnus would have met in single combat long
ago. In Book XI, Turnus’s planned ambush in the mountains
removes the main characters from the fighting and then, coincidentally, keeps them from meeting at the last moment. Virgil delays
this final confrontation for as long as possible, thus building
the tension.
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appropriate treaty, with Aeneas’s consent. The next day, the armies
gather as spectators on either side of a field in front of the city.
Juno worries about Turnus because she suspects that Aeneas
outmatches him. She calls Juturna, Turnus’s sister, and tells her to
watch out for her brother’s safety. Latinus and Aeneas both come
out onto the battlefield, and each vows to uphold his side of the
pact. But Juturna, not wanting her brother to risk the duel,
appears to the Latin army disguised as a noble officer named Camers and goads the Latins to break the treaty and fight now that the
Trojans are off their guard. Turnus’s troops begin to agree, and
suddenly one of them hurls a spear at the Trojans’ ranks, killing a
young soldier. This unprovoked shot ignites both armies. They fly
at each other with sword and lance. Aeneas calls for his men to
stop, but as he yells, a stray arrow wounds him in the leg, forcing
him to retreat.
Watching Aeneas leave the field gives Turnus new hope. He
enters the battle and lays waste to a slew of soldiers on the Trojan
side. Meanwhile, Aeneas is helped back to camp, but the physician
cannot remove the arrow from his leg. Venus pities her suffering son
and sends down a healing balm. The physician uses the balm, dislodging the arrow and closing the wound.
Aeneas takes up his arms again and returns to the battle, where
the Latin troops before him scatter in terror. Both he and Turnus kill
many men, turning the tide of the battle back and forth. Suddenly,
Aeneas realizes that Latinus’s city has been left unguarded. He gathers a group of soldiers and attacks the city, panicking its citizens.
Queen Amata, seeing the Trojans within the city walls, loses all
hope and hangs herself. Turnus hears cries of suffering from the city
and rushes back to the rescue. Not wanting his people to suffer further, he calls for the siege to end and for Aeneas to emerge and fight
him hand-to-hand, as they had agreed that morning. Aeneas meets
him in the city’s main courtyard, and at last, with all the troops circled round, the duel begins.
First, Aeneas and Turnus toss their spears. They then exchange
fierce blows with their swords. At Turnus’s first strike, his sword
suddenly breaks off at the hilt—in his haste, he had grabbed some
other soldier’s weaker sword. Turnus flees from Aeneas, calling for
his real sword, which Juturna finally furnishes for him. Juno
observes the action from above, and Jupiter asks her why she bothers—she already knows the struggle’s inevitable outcome. Juno
finally gives in and consents to abandon her grudge against Aeneas,
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on one condition: she wants the victorious Trojans to take on the
name and the language of the Latins. Jupiter gladly agrees.
Jupiter sends down one of the Furies, who assumes the form of a
bird and flaps and shrieks in front of Turnus, filling him with terror
and weakening him. Seeing Turnus waver, Aeneas casts his mighty
spear and strikes Turnus’s leg, and Turnus tumbles to the ground.
As Aeneas advances, Turnus pleads for mercy for the sake of his
father. Aeneas is moved—but just as he decides to let Turnus live, he
sees the belt of Pallas tied around Turnus’s shoulder. As Aeneas
remembers the slain youth, his rage returns in a surge. In the name of
Pallas, Aeneas drives his sword into Turnus, killing him.
Analysis
s ummary & analys i s
Since Turnus’s entrance in Book VII, his behavior has been brash,
confident, and self-assured, yet he shows himself to be vulnerable
and complacent in this final book of the Aeneid. Even before his
final battle with Aeneas, he seems to have surrendered to the fates he
earlier resists. When he sees the city of Latinus awake with flame, he
says to Juturna that fate has defeated his forces and that he has
resigned himself to his death. The Turnus we hear uttering these
words hardly seems the same man who, earlier in the epic, taunts the
Trojans, insulting their manhood and calling them “twice-conquered” (IX.837) and “effete” (IX.860), or lacking vitality. When
he begs Aeneas for mercy on his knees, ignoring the fact that he has
lost in fair combat and thus deserves to die, he hardly seems the same
man who earlier values his honor more than his life. Virgil provides
little explanation for Turnus’s transformation other than Turnus’s
dismay at hearing of the queen’s suicide and the attack on the city.
But, clearly, Virgil could not allow death to transform Turnus from
Aeneas’s mortal nemesis into a tragic hero. We might feel some sympathy for Turnus’s resilience against the fates, but it represents the
opposite of Aeneas’s pious submission to the decrees of fate.
Juno undergoes a similar turnaround at the epic’s conclusion.
Until her conversation with Jupiter in Book XII, she stubbornly
ignores the fates in her persecution of Aeneas. She knows she cannot
win, but nevertheless she wants Aeneas to suffer, for her own satisfaction. Yet when Jupiter again points out that Aeneas is destined to
prevail, as he has done often enough before, Juno suddenly crumbles, asking only that the Latin name and language be preserved.
Like Turnus, Juno drives the plot of the Aeneid more than Aeneas
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s ummary & analys i s
does. Her sudden resignation represents the end of the epic’s major
conflict, as the antagonistic, tempestuous, and willful characters are
subdued by the forces of order.
The poem ends with a somber description of Turnus’s death:
“And with a groan for that indignity [of death] / [Turnus’s] spirit
fled into the gloom below” (XII.1297–1298). Virgil does not narrate the epic’s true resolution, the supposedly happy marriage
between Aeneas and Lavinia and the initiation of the project of
building Rome. Two elements of the classical tradition influence
this ending. First, Virgil is again imitating Homer, whose Iliad concludes with the death of Hector, the great Trojan enemy of the
Greek hero Achilles. Second, Virgil wants his Roman audience to
feel that they themselves, not Aeneas’s exploits, are the glorious
conclusion to this epic story.
Important Quotations
Explained
1.
With these opening lines of the Aeneid, Virgil enters the epic tradition in the shadow of Homer, author of the Iliad, an epic of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, an epic of the Greek hero Ulysses’
wanderings homeward from Troy. By naming his subjects as “warfare and a man,” Virgil establishes himself as an heir to the themes
of both Homeric epics. The man, Aeneas, spends the first half of the
epic wandering in search of a new home and the second half at war
fighting to establish this homeland. Lines 2 through 4 summarize
Aeneas’s first mission in the epic, to emigrate from Troy to Italy, as
a fate already accomplished. We know from Virgil’s use of the past
tense that what he presents is history, that the end is certain, and that
the epic will be an exercise in poetic description of historical events.
In the phrase “our Lavinian . . . shore,” Virgil connects his audience,
his Roman contemporaries, to Aeneas, the hero of “early days.”
Even though we do not learn Aeneas’s name in these lines, we
learn much about him. The fact that Aeneas’s name is withheld for
so long—until line 131—emphasizes Aeneas’s lack of importance
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quotati ons
I sing of warfare and a man at war.
From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
He came to Italy by destiny,
To our Lavinian western shore,
A fugitive, this captain, buffeted
...
Till he could found a city and bring home
His gods to Laetium, land of the Latin race,
The Alban lords, and the high walls of Rome.
Tell me the causes now, O Muse, how galled
...
From her old wound, the queen of gods compelled him—
...
To undergo so many perilous days
And enter on so many trials. Can anger
Black as this prey on the minds of heaven?
(I.1–19)
quotati ons
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as an individual; his contribution to the future defines him. He is a
“fugitive” and a “captain” and therefore a leader of men. That he
bears responsibility to “bring home / His gods” introduces the
concept of Aeneas’s piety through his duty to the hearth gods of
Troy. Most important, we learn that Aeneas is “a man apart,
devoted to his mission.” Aeneas’s detachment from temporal and
emotional concerns and his focus on the mission of founding
Rome, to which Virgil alludes in the image of walls in line 12,
increase as the epic progresses.
In this opening passage, Virgil mentions the divine obstacle that
will plague Aeneas throughout his quest: the “sleepless rage” of
the “queen of gods,” Juno. Aeneas will suffer in the face of storms
at sea and, later, a war on land, and Virgil attributes both these
impediments to Juno’s cruelty. In line 13, the poet asks the muse to
explain the causes of Juno’s ire. The invocation of a muse is the traditional opening line to an epic in the classical tradition beginning
with Homer. Virgil delays his invocation of the muse by a dozen
lines, first summarizing what might be considered a matter of mortal history, and then inquiring the muse of the matter’s divine
causes.
Virgil’s question, “Can anger / Black as this prey on the minds of
heaven?” brings up the ancients’ relationship to the gods. Within
their polytheistic religious system, the Greeks and Romans reckoned the will of the gods to be the cause of all events on Earth.
Instead of attributing forces of good and evil to the gods, as later
religions did, the Greeks and Romans believed the gods to be motivated by emotions recognizable to humans—jealousy, vanity, pride,
generosity, and loyalty, for example. The primary conflict in the
Aeneid is Juno’s vindictive anger against the forces of fate, which
have ordained Aeneas’s mission to bring Troy to Italy, enabling the
foundation of Rome.
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Did you suppose, my father,
That I could tear myself away and leave you?
Unthinkable; how could a father say it?
Now if it pleases the powers about that nothing
Stand of this great city; if your heart
Is set on adding your own death and ours
To that of Troy, the door’s wide open for it.
(II.857–863)
quotati ons
In this passage from Book II, which precedes Aeneas’s flight from
burning Troy with his father upon his back, Virgil distinguishes
Aeneas for his piety. This sense of duty has two components. The
first is a filial component: Aeneas is a dutiful son to Anchises, and he
wants to escape with him to safety. Aeneas makes it plain that his
strong sense of family loyalty will not allow him to abandon
Anchises. The second is a social component: Anchises, Aeneas
argues, cannot choose to stay and die at Troy without affecting
many others. Anchises is a patriarch, and were he to resign himself
to death, he would effectively choose death for them all. These
words of Aeneas’s lift Anchises out of the self-indulgence of despair
and remind him of the leadership role that his seniority and status
demand. In the ensuing episodes, even after his death, Anchises
serves as a wise counselor to his son as Aeneas makes his way
toward Italy.
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3.
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Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.
(VI.1151–1154)
This passage is part of the speech Anchises delivers to Aeneas in the
underworld, in Book VI, as he unfolds for his son the destiny of
Rome. Virgil places his own political ideals in the mouth of the wise
father, warning that the Roman nation should be more merciful
than violent, even in its conquests. Virgil here propounds the values
for which he wants Rome to stand, and which he believes he has, in
his own time, let guide him. Anchises’ rhetoric here about the
Roman Empire’s justification for its conquering of other peoples
expresses the same justification that Aeneas and the Trojans make
for settling in Rome. They defend their invasion by arguing that they
bring justice, law, and warfare—with which they “pacify” and
“battle down”—to the conquered. Especially in modern times, critics and readers have taken passages such as this one and labeled
them propaganda for the Augustan regime. This criticism is valid,
but when the values of a regime are expressed by a poet who shares
those values, the line between art and propaganda becomes blurry.
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Amata tossed and turned with womanly
Anxiety and anger. Now [Allecto]
Plucked one of the snakes, her gloomy tresses,
And tossed it at the woman, sent it down
Her bosom to her midriff and her heart,
...
Slipping between her gown and her smooth breasts
...
While the infection first, like dew of poison
Fallen on her, pervaded all her senses,
Netting her bones in fire.
(VII. 474–490)
quotati ons
This vivid and disturbing description of the means by which the
Fury Allecto incites Amata’s rage against Aeneas occurs in Book VII.
Virgil plays on our senses, using images of fire, disease, poison, and
sex to describe the passionate anger Amata feels at seeing her daughter’s proposed marriage thwarted and at hearing that a Trojan exile
is to become part of her household. Virgil expresses the idea of being
hot with anger by employing the images of things that, literally or
figuratively, can heat a human’s blood. The invisible snake deployed
by Allecto acts to enhance emotions already latent within Amata,
since Amata already feels “womanly / Anxiety and anger” of her
own. Even though Amata has perfectly good reason to despise
Aeneas and the Trojans, Virgil explains her hatred by placing it
physically in her body, suggesting that she incites war in the way she
does because there is something wrong inside her. The snake
unleashed by Juno essentially has a sexual encounter with Amata—
it is as though Juno has impregnated Amata with madness.
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5.
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When two bulls lower heads and horns and charge
In deadly combat . . .
...
[They g]ore one another, bathing necks and humps
In sheets of blood, and the whole woodland bellows.
Just so Trojan Aeneas and the hero
Son of Daunus, battering shield on shield,
Fought with a din that filled the air of heaven.
(XII.972–982)
This passage from Book XII, in which Virgil describes Aeneas and
Turnus locked together in the heat of battle, exemplifies a literary
device Virgil employs throughout the poem: the epic simile. Virgil’s
similes are extended comparisons of an element of action or a
character to an abstract or external image or concept. These similes are often drawn from rural landscapes and farm life, and they
often use the phrase “just so” as a connector. They give Virgil’s
writing a descriptive richness by lingering at great length on some
detail that might not otherwise have been illuminated. Often, Virgil uses the similes to give an interior depth to his characters,
showing us by means of an analogy what it feels like to be that
character in a given moment. This particular epic simile describes
the intense battle between Aeneas and Turnus. By comparing these
two warriors to bulls, Virgil conveys the potent, animalistic nature
of their struggle.
Key Facts
fu ll ti tle
The Aeneid
au thor
Virgil
type of work
Epic poem
g en re
Heroic epic; mythological story
lan g uag e
Latin
ti m e an d place w r itten
Around 20 b.c., probably in Rome and in the north of Italy, and
perhaps in Greece
date of first publication
Virgil died in 19 b.c., before he finished revising the Aeneid; it
was published after his death.
poi n t of vi ew
When Virgil controls the narration, the point of view includes
the actions of the gods as well as the human story; Aeneas, in his
storytelling, does not have this access to the gods’ perspective
and relates events only from his own perspective.
ton e
When treating the glory of Rome, the epic is solemn and
honorific. When Virgil depicts the victims of history—those
who suffered in the course of the founding of Rome, like Dido—
his tone is tragic and sympathetic.
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key facts
narrator
The poet Virgil, although Aeneas himself assumes the narration
in Books II and III, when he gives a retrospective account of his
adventures
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ten s e
Usually past, sometimes switching to present to increase the
immediacy of a scene. Virgil also uses the future tense, for
prophecy and prediction.
s etti n g (ti m e)
In the aftermath of the Trojan War, about 1000 b.c.
s etti n g (place)
The Mediterranean, including the north coast of Asia Minor,
Carthage, and Italy
protag on i s t
Aeneas
key facts
major conflict
Aeneas is fated to travel from the ruins of Troy to Italy, where
he will establish a race that will lead to the founding of Rome.
Juno, harboring feelings of vengeance against the Trojans,
impedes Aeneas’s mission by inciting a romance between
Aeneas and Dido and then a war between the Trojans and the
Latins, causing suffering for the hero, his fleet, and many whom
they encounter on the way.
ri s i n g acti on
The epic has two parts: Aeneas’s wanderings in Books I–VI, and
his struggle to establish himself in Latium in Books VII–XII. In
the first half of the epic, Aeneas tells the story of the siege of
Troy and his escape, causing Dido to love him. In the second
half of the epic, King Latinus offers the hand of his daughter,
Lavinia, to Aeneas in marriage, and Juno responds by inciting
rage in the hearts of Queen Amata and Turnus and then opening
the Gates of War.
cli m ax
In the first half of the epic, Venus and Juno contrive to isolate
Dido and Aeneas in a cave during a hunting trip, and there the
two lovers consummate their affair. In the second half of the
epic, Turnus kills Pallas, inciting the lethal vengeance of Aeneas.
falli n g acti on
In the first half of the epic, Aeneas leaves Carthage for Italy at
Mercury’s prodding, causing the heartbroken Dido to kill
herself. In the second half, the war between the Trojans and the
Latins comes down to a duel between Aeneas and Turnus.
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Aeneas wins, and, after considering sparing his enemy’s life, he
decides to kill Turnus to avenge Pallas’s death.
them es
The primacy of fate; the suffering of wanderers; the glory of
Rome
m oti fs
Prophecies and predictions; founding a new city; vengeance
sym bols
Flames; the golden bough; the Gates of War; the Trojan hearth
gods; weather
fores hadow i n g
The events of the epic narrative are already history to the
Roman audience. The many dreams and prophecies of various
characters reveal a veiled future to mortals and are the epic’s
strongest form of foreshadowing. Also, when Turnus kills
Pallas, Virgil foreshadows Turnus’s own death.
key facts
Study Questions &
Essay Topics
STUDY QUESTIONS
1.
How negatively does Aeneas’s abandonment of Dido
reflect on his character?
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ques ti ons & e s s ays
Though Aeneas cannot resist the will of the gods or fate, which
demands that he leave Carthage, the manner in which he leaves Dido
is not beyond contempt. We know from other passages that Aeneas
is not a character without compassion, yet if Aeneas feels genuine
sympathy for the lover he is about to abandon, he fails to express it
well. He speaks formally and tersely to Dido, offers her little comfort, and denies that an official marriage bound them to each other.
He refers to Troy and the new home he plans to found in Italy and
talks of his son’s future. We can find fault in Aeneas because, while
Virgil allows us a view of Aeneas’s emotions of sadness, regret, and
reluctance as he leaves Carthage, Aeneas expresses little of these
emotions to Dido. If we consider one’s self to reside in one’s will and
emotions, Aeneas betrays himself by leaving Dido, and he admits as
much, claiming that her words set them “both afire” (IV.498).
Both Aeneas and Dido face a conflict between civic responsibility
and individual desire. Aeneas sides with his obligations, while Dido
submits to her desires, and so their love is tragically impossible. In
terms of his patriotic duty, Aeneas acts impeccably, though he may be
faulted for staying with Dido in Carthage as long as he does. His
abandonment of Dido is necessary his service to Troy, his allies, his
son, his father, and fate. From this point of view, Aeneas acts correctly in subjecting his desires to the benefit of the Trojan people.
Dido fails her city by ignoring her civic duty from the point when
she falls in love with Aeneas to her suicide. Virgil suggests that Dido’s
suicide mythically anticipates Rome’s defeat of Carthage, hundreds
of years later. How negatively we judge Aeneas for his abandonment
of Dido depends not on whether we sympathize with or blame Dido,
but on whether we believe that Aeneas’s manner of leaving her—and
not his departure itself—is what causes her suicide.
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2.
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To what extent is the Aeneid a political poem? Is
it propaganda?
q ue s ti ons & es s ays
The Aeneid’s main purpose is to create a myth of origins that consolidates Rome’s historical and cultural identity. This search for origins
of a race or culture is a political endeavor, in that it seeks to justify
the Roman Empire’s existence and to glorify the empire through the
poem’s greatness. Yet the Aeneid is also an artistic endeavor, and
therefore to dismiss the poem as mere propaganda is to ignore its
obvious artistic merit.
In many of the passages referring explicitly to the emperor
Augustus—in Anchises’ presentation of the future of Rome, for
example—Virgil’s language suggests an honest and heartfelt appreciation of Augustus’s greatness. It is worth noting, however, that in
addition to being the emperor, Augustus was also Virgil’s patron. It
would thus have been impossible for Virgil to criticize him outright
in his work. One can argue that Virgil may not have truly believed in
Augustus’s greatness and that the impossibility of explicit criticism
forced him to resort to subtle irony in order to air any grievances
regarding Augustus’s policies or ideology.
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What is the relationship in the Aeneid between an
individual’s merit and the degree to which his or her
personality is interesting? How might our estimation
differ from Virgil’s?
In some ways, Juno, Dido, and Turnus are more developed, welldefined characters than Aeneas is. They act on their desires and
emotions and assert their wills, and Virgil puts much of his best
poetry into the words and descriptions of these three. Yet throughout the Aeneid, there is a straightforward appreciation of the order,
duty, and piety embodied by Aeneas. He follows the will of the gods
and respects the deceased and the unborn at the expense of his own
happiness. Again and again, we are told that Aeneas suffers
inwardly, despite his outward appearance. These qualities, though
admirable, still do not make Aeneas the most vivid or captivating of
heroes. They are important because they are the vaunted qualities
Aeneas shares with Rome under the peaceful rule of Augustus.
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q ue s ti ons & es s ays
SUGGESTED ESSAY TOPICS
1.
What is the role of dreams in the Aeneid?
2.
How do you explain the surprise alterations of character
and abrupt ending of Book XII? How does Book XII fit in
with the rest of the Aeneid, with respect to both characters
and plot?
3.
Is the plot of the Aeneid driven more by the gods or by
human characters? Does Aeneas, by himself, have the will to
make it to Italy, or is it necessary for him to be prodded along
the way?
4.
Why do you think Virgil starts the story in the middle and
then spends two chapters on Aeneas’s retrospective? What
does he achieve with such a structure?
5.
How do Aeneas’s piety and sense of duty change as the
poem unfolds?
6.
How does the behavior of the gods reflect on
human qualities?
7.
How are the various Italian peoples (Latins, Arcadians,
Volscians) depicted, in relation to the Trojans and to
each other?
Review & Resources
QUIZ
1.
Which of the gods is the staunchest enemy of Aeneas and
the Trojans?
A.
B.
C.
D.
2.
Who is the queen of Carthage, the city-state where Aeneas
lands after the big storm in Book I?
A.
B.
C.
D.
3.
Venus
Dido
Cassandra
Helen
What was hidden inside the wooden belly of the horse left
outside the Trojan gates?
Greek warriors
Treasure
Trojan hearth gods
A bomb
Who does not die in the sack of Troy?
A.
B.
C.
D.
King Priam
Priam’s son, Polites
Aeneas’s wife, Creusa
Aeneas’s son, Ascanius
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revi e w & re s ou rc e s
A.
B.
C.
D.
4.
Jupiter
Venus
Neptune
Juno
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5.
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What prophesy does the Harpy issue?
A.
B.
C.
D.
6.
rev ie w & re s ou rces
In Troy
In Carthage
In Rome
In the underworld
How do the young Trojan boys participate in the contests
in Sicily?
A.
B.
C.
D.
10.
Aeneas
Dido
Dido’s husband, Sychaeus
Anchises
Where does Aeneas last see Dido?
A.
B.
C.
D.
9.
Antander, near Troy
Crete
Italy
Drepanum, in Sicily
Who breaks off the love affair between Aeneas and Dido?
A.
B.
C.
D.
8.
That the Trojans will never make it to Italy
That the Trojans will eat their own tables
That Dido will commit suicide
That Virgil will become the greatest Roman poet
Where does Anchises, Aeneas’s father, die?
A.
B.
C.
D.
7.
virgil
They play an ancient Mediterranean form of lacrosse
They have a wheelbarrow race
They exhibit their horsemanship in a mock battle
They are offered as prizes
Who sets fire to the Trojan fleet in Sicily, the first time the
ships burn?
A.
B.
C.
D.
Jupiter
Juno
Aeneas
The women of Troy
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11.
D.
Turnus
Latinus
Amata
Juno
What symbolizes the beginning of battle for the Latins?
A.
B.
C.
D.
A sacrifice to Mars
The donning of ritual armor
A procession in honor of ancient war heroes
The opening of the Gates of War
How does Evander know Aeneas’s father, Anchises?
A.
B.
C.
D.
Anchises visited Arcadia when Evander was young
Evander grew up in Troy
They met in Carthage when both were guests of Dido
Anchises grew up in Arcadia
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15.
The ghost of his father appears
An emissary comes to meet him
The Trojans fulfill the Harpy’s prediction by eating
their “tables” of bread
He has a vision of the future glory of Rome
Who does not oppose the marriage of Lavinia to Aeneas?
A.
B.
C.
D.
14.
A golden bough
A letter from his father
A lock of Dido’s hair
The Sibyl
When Aeneas lands in Latium, how does he know he has
come to the right place?
A.
B.
C.
13.
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What token must Aeneas carry to be admitted alive into the
underworld?
A.
B.
C.
D.
12.
H
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16.
H
Who makes the strong and beautiful new armor Aeneas
wears into battle?
A.
B.
C.
D.
17.
C.
D.
rev ie w & re s ou rces
Turnus
Nisus
Pallas
Ascanius
Who kills Pallas?
A.
B.
C.
D.
20.
Because Venus intervenes
Because the nymphs had been trapped in the hulls for
a hundred years waiting to be released
Because Ascanius’s prayer is answered
Because they were built out of wood sacred to Cybele
Who begs to be executed in place of his friend Euryalus?
A.
B.
C.
D.
19.
Jupiter
Hercules
Vulcan
Cupid
Why do the Trojan ships turn into sea nymphs when Turnus
tries to burn them?
A.
B.
18.
virgil
Aeneas
Turnus
Dido
Pygmalion
How does Juno get Turnus away from battle and onto
a ship?
A.
B.
C.
D.
She leaves a trail of bread crumbs
She sends Iris to tell him the ship is burning
She disguises herself as Aeneas and runs onto the ship
She initiates a battle at sea
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21.
Amata
Turnus
Hector
Juno
What request does Juno make as she finally gives in to
Aeneas’s fated victory?
A.
B.
C.
D.
That he have no descendents
That Turnus be spared
That Rome and Carthage be enemies for all time
That Italy inherit the Latins’ name and language and
not the Trojans’
What counteracts Aeneas’s impulse to spare Turnus’s life?
A.
B.
C.
D.
He knows Turnus will be ashamed to receive
his mercy
He sees the belt that Turnus took from the dead Pallas
He remembers his father’s warning
He wants to avenge Dido’s death
Answer Key:
1: D; 2: B; 3: A; 4: D; 5: B; 6: D; 7: A; 8: D; 9: C; 10: D; 11: A;
12: C; 13: B; 14: D; 15: A; 16: C; 17: D; 18: B; 19: B; 20: C;
21: A; 22: D; 23: A; 24: D; 25: B
revi e w & re s ou rc e s
25.
Lavinia
Amata
Elissa
Camilla
Who, besides Dido, commits suicide?
A.
B.
C.
D.
24.
12 days
24 days
12 hours
24 hours
Which woman slays many Trojans in battle?
A.
B.
C.
D.
23.
77
How long is the burial truce to which the two armies agree?
A.
B.
C.
D.
22.
H
78
H
virgil
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
cairns, francis. Virgil’s Augustan Epic. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
camps, w. a. An Introduction to Virgil’s aeneid. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1969.
commager, steele, ed. Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1966.
frank, tenney. Vergil, A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1922.
nitchie, elizabeth. Vergil and the English Poets. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1919.
putnam, michael. The Poetry of the aeneid. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1965.
quinn, kenneth. Virgil’s aeneid: A Critical Description.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968.
rev ie w & re s ou rces
slavitt, david r. Virgil. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.